The Term Between

In these stories, set in Montana, the North American West, and farther afield, Brady Harrison explores the fragile ties that bind, and often break, as the characters do their best to navigate the complexities of a sometime chaotic, sometime hopeful, sometime violent world. In the opening story, "The Guest," a reporter attempts to understand the actions of a woman involved in a devastating accident. In "The Sumerian in the Driveway," a transplanted Canadian living in Montana plays street hockey with an ancient Sumerian and listens closely to the 3000 year old man's tale of a fateful journey. In still other stories, as an unexpected event brings a community of outcasts together, a young protagonist attempts to sort through what she does and does not know about a ghostly, fearful man even more out of place than the rest; a Montana college student, working on the killfloor of a meatpacking plant, finds himself in a place he might not want to be; a documentary filmmaker from Missoula joins two kayakers to run a daunting river in the Andes. The collection closes with "The Dying Albertan," a novella about a notorious Canadian artist who refuses to tell the truth either about himself or his work; hired to interview Niall O'Keevan on the 25th anniversary of his most famous piece, Ritu Agarwal suspects not only that the monstrous sculpture tells a story, but that the story O'Keevan tells about the work may not be the truth. In these strange, challenging, and beautifully written tales, Harrison takes us through the maelstrom of the term between, our few moments between eternities.