Where I Am Now.
Day, Robert (Author)
Nov 2012. 172 p. BkMk, paperback, $15.95. (9781886157828).
Day notes in the preface to this collection that first-person narratives give us the opportunity “to be more than ourselves as we tell them.” Nowhere is this more true than in these seven stories in which Day inhabits the perspectives of diverse individuals, exploring their hopes, shortcomings, and hidden truths.
The narrator of “The Skull Hunter” is a philandering husband working at a river resort, who finds and sells old animal skulls to a collector. He keeps a separate cache of stories for himself that he doesn’t share with anyone, not even his wife, until he realizes that only the bones he digs out of the riverbank really know him. The title story—the only one not set in the American heartland—is narrated by an ex-pat American writer living in the French countryside and writing a story about his neighbors and their stories. Day’s smart and lovely writing effortlessly animates his characters, hinting at their secrets and coyly dangling a glimpse of rich and story-filled lives in front of his readers.
— Sarah Hunter
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