Palindrome: Stories

Review
“Elizabeth Genovise’s writing invites readers into the mystical realm of our humanity. Lucid and lovely, her language takes us on journeys to places it is hard to imagine, geographically and spiritually, outside and in. She is a powerful new voice in American literature.”
—Tim Gautreaux
“The nine extraordinary stories in Palindrome reveal difficult lives, vastly different in their particulars but common to one another by being, as one character calls it, ‘pierced through with regret.’ These are gritty-hearted stories, as true to life as they can be, beautifully written and hauntingly memorable.”
—Thom Satterlee, author of God’s Liar: A Novel
“The stories in Elizabeth Genovise’s Palindrome are dispatches from lives of calamity. Here is a catalogue of human woe—suicide, dying children, burnings, mass shootings, car crashes, drownings—yet the characters, with their everyday humanity, labor toward whatever hard-won and temporary deliverance they can find. Yes, these are tales of the metastasizing power of grief, of fissuring faith, but they are also moving and deftly-written testaments to our stubborn human insistence, to our gritty determination to carry our past sorrows with dignity and even hope.
—Doug Ramspeck, author of Under Black Leaves and The Owl That Carries Us Away
“Immersive, surprising, and utterly convincing, the short stories of Elizabeth Genovise unfold effortlessly, with a clarity of vision and an understanding of character that all great fiction writers possess. Genovise will break your heart and mend it.”
—Matthew Vollmer, author of Permanent Exhibit
A carpenter does verbal battle with God over his son’s early death. A young man haunted by his cousin’s suicide has an opportunity to redeem himself of his former negligence; an alcoholic reunites with the man who ruined his marriage, and discovers more than he bargained for in the child he may or may not have fathered. A mother attempts to comfort her daughter after her son-in-law drowns in the Gulf of Mexico and finds herself strangely implicated. After a school shooting, a college professor becomes obsessed with vengeance, but not for the first time. A veteran tasked with driving his daughter to an abortion clinic is forced to acknowledge painful truths about his own history of love; a woman recalls night-hikes to a rescue zoo with the troubled boy who shifted the arc of her life; a widow has the foundation torn out from beneath her when she discovers her husband’s long-term infidelity. And in the title story, a pair of cousins flee the Vietnam draft only to find that there is no escape from what they most fear. The characters in Palindrome find themselves boomeranged into situations for which they weren’t prepared, and they have no choice but to confront their emotional and spiritual challenges if they wish to move forward with their lives.