Discovering the World: Collected Stories
Thomas Jeffrey Vasseur

Thomas Jeffrey Vasseur steeps us in different experiences set in a disappearing rural South, the New South, and the world at large. One of the striking things here is storytelling variety: a little boy discovers the wonder and allure of flight; a ballet dancer from Texas falls in love; a Southern native meets a Vietnam veteran and sailboat builder who takes him to French Polynesia, a Kentucky choir minister adopts a disturbed, trouble-causing son. These tales of passion are full of peril and recurrent awareness of mortality, the gaps that separate all people and threaten to separate them further from those they love.

This collection devotes itself strongly to a sense of place, both personal and collective history, some lyrical and some hard truths about the various regions and locales that inspired it. In its variety of modes and themes—city versus country life, sexual desire and parenthood, our very American pursuit of earthly happiness and our resilient faith in God—Discovering the World is a collection that probes the nooks and crannies of the human heart.

Praise

"These stories are some of the most sophisticated Southern stories I’ve ever read. Sophisticated in that the subjects and characters have universal appeal. And what's best about Vasseur is that he can write."

—Janice Daugharty
Pulitzer Prize nominee, and author of Like a Sister
and Earl in the Yellow Shirt: A Novel.

"Discovering the World is a wonderfully diverse collection. I read one story, marvelling at its comic, angry speed, pockets of light and dark like sunlight filtered into a forest, and said: this is Southern."

—Debra Monroe
winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Fiction, and author of
"The Source of Trouble," "A Wild, Cold State" and "Newfangled."

Thomas Jeffrey Vasseur was raised on a small cattle farm in western Kentucky. His home is the South. He left his native state at twenty-one, traveled and worked odd jobs, spending extended periods in South America and Europe. He has received a Utah Fiction Award, a North Point Fellowship, and an NEH Grant. He is completing a novel and teaches at Valdosta State University.

Other Titles by This Author

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The Picture Frame and Other Stories
Robert Drake
0-86554-689-4, H510, $23.00t, Hardback.

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