Keep and Other Stories
Ebook
Emerging writer Peter Biles offers his first anthology of short stories. Composed with experimental boldness, the stories extend from the hilarious to the grim, from urban disillusionment to rural desperation, from fantasy to gritty realism, and from frustrated longing to quiet hope. With creative debts owed to the likes of Raymond Carver, Flannery O'Connor, and Anton Chekhov, Keep and Other Stories explores human life and relations in a world where utility and power are all that matters. "Keep," the penultimate story about two teenage lovers in a dying Colorado lumber town, seeks to unify the anthology into a thematic whole with its tender treatment of characters who are at a crossroads with each other, the dispassionate way of the world, and their own conflicted hearts.
“Peter Biles has made these lean, lively, surprising stories lithe enough to perform a challenging but necessary one-two move: They push back with wry, dark humor against late American tendencies to monetize, commodify, and falsify experience; yet they also stretch beyond satire to demand a tender attention to the easily missed yet priceless beauties of an examined life. In one protagonist’s words, ‘Sometimes God shows us remarkable ordinaries just so we’ll look.’ Biles does, too.”
—Katy Carl, author of As Earth without Water
“Writing with the distillate wisdom of parables, the lyricism of poetry, and the roofless imagination of a born storyteller, Biles deftly weaves magic carpets that ferry us through the invisible currents of human longing, our abiding need for connection, love, and grace. Few writers craft stories of such assurance, magic, and wonder. Every story is a brilliant gem, a gift shining just for you.”
—Gina Ochsner, author of The Hidden Letters of Velta B
“Peter Biles is a writer of extraordinary gifts, a young artist with an old soul that’s insightful and wise. His stories speak quietly yet sing, rendering people and the worlds they inhabit fully and resonantly; compact and unassuming yet bursting with emotional truth, with the purest kind of reality.”
—Robert Clark, author of Mr. White’s Confession
- Title: Keep and Other Stories
- Author: Peter Biles
- Publisher: Resource Publications
- Print Publication Date: 2022
- Logos Release Date: 2023
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9781666753288, 9781666753264, 1666753262, 9781666753271, 1666753270, 1666753289
- Resource ID: LLS:9781666753288
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2023-06-20T23:02:46Z
Peter Biles is a novelist, essayist, and journalist from Oklahoma. He earned a BA in English writing from Wheaton College in Illinois and went on to receive an MFA in creative writing from Seattle Pacific University. He is the author of Hillbilly Hymn (Resource Publications, 2022) and has written stories and essays for a variety of journals.