“gritty and elegant”

/ Andrew Forbes / Leave a comment

This is a breath taking collection—in that it is literally hard to breathe while you read these stories, such is their power, insight, and ability to expertly mine the secret vein of sorrow that runs below every ordinary, extraordinary life. Forbes’ stories manage to be gritty and elegant at the same time, rendered with Munro-esque mastery and restraint.

—Grace O’Connell, author of Be Ready for the Lightning and Magnified World

 

Lands and Forests is available for pre-order now.

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“The weather, like love, is always uncertain”

/ Andrew Forbes / Leave a comment

Warning: There are floods and fires in here. And life and death struggles. And long journeys. And near misses. The weather, like love, is always uncertain. But there is no need to fear. Andrew Forbes will get us through. He knows the way. These stories are elemental, wise, and beautiful.

— Alexander MacLeod, Scotiabank Giller Prize-nominated author of Light Lifting

Lands and Forests

/ Andrew Forbes / Leave a comment

“In this superbly stark, brooding collection, disillusioned men and women struggle along, the potential for grandeur in their futures long since faded. And yet there is still awe amid their resignation—for the beauty in the world, and sometimes for each other. With Lands and Forests, Andrew Forbes digs beneath stunning, wild landscapes to find all of the unhappiness buried there, unearthing life’s cruel disappointments and splaying them out on the dirt one by one. These are bleak, sharp, ruthless stories, and I loved them.”

— Jessica Westhead, author of Things Not to Do and And Also Sharks

Dispatch#9: I shall not pass this way again

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The Bisons eventually fell to visiting Pawtucket, but that didn’t seem all that noteworthy as the shells exploded above our heads in red and green and blue and white splashes and my kids whooped and screamed and laughed. After the last of the smoke drifted over Swan Street we headed for the gate in no particular hurry to get anywhere, though we were suddenly on the wrong end of a three hour drive, our beds at the other. Leaving, we all intuited, meant saying a practical goodbye to what had been a very good summer indeed, though it was then not yet September.

— “Dispatch #9: I shall not pass this way again,” for Sinkhole magazine

Dispatch #8: Relics

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I’ve always wanted a catcher’s mitt, and this one cost me thirteen bucks. It needed a small bit of re-lacing, nothing that was beyond my meager abilities. The day after I bought it, it featured prominently in a day of catch, shagging flies, a chip truck, cold Cokes, a bag of cherries. There was a stinging grounder and a bloody nose, and later there was swimming.

— “Dispatch #8: Relics,” for Sinkhole magazine

Dispatch #7: ICHIRO SUZUKI, THE STAR OF BASEBALL

/ Andrew Forbes / Leave a comment

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That an inactive fansite should survive such a span of time – three administrations, several wars, five Star Wars films – is not remarkable. The internet is vast, and great swaths of it have succumbed to link rot, domain scrapers, the churn of ISPs, but most of it remains, hidden only by the great volume of new content. Your Blogger site is still kicking around somewhere, as is your Myspace page. These digital presences accumulate as a matter of course, and as we abandon them they spread out behind us like a wake.

— “Dispatch #7: ICHIRO SUZUKI, THE STAR OF BASEBALL,” for Sinkhole magazine

Dispatch #6: The gray area

/ Andrew Forbes / Leave a comment

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It seems a bit simplistic to me, though, to suggest that The Steroid Era comprises a stain on the game’s history. It is, to be sure, a reminder that in a collision of faith and capitalism, capitalism almost inevitably triumphs. But labelling it an aberration feels uncomfortably close to laying all the blame at the feet of players, when the truth is that the history of baseball is characterized by efforts to streamline the flow of money toward those in control; rest assured that, during the period in question, all concerned were reaping the windfall of increased gates and greater viewership. Baseball had succeeded in re-entering the zeitgeist just a few short years after the labor stoppage which had alienated a huge number of its paying customers, and it did so thanks to the record number of balls leaving big league yards all over America. Tellingly, even though everybody seemed quite aware of the manner in which performance-enhancing substances were changing the game, nobody seemed terrifically interested in doing anything about it.

— “Dispatch #6: The gray area,” for Sinkhole magazine

 

Dispatch #5: American Berserk

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In American Pastoral, Philip Roth identified a strain of dark anxiety he deemed the “indigenous American berserk,” and the contemporary home run seems to speak to that anxiety, expressing aspects of America’s gobbling ambition, its voraciousness, the muscly sense that to grind a ball into dust is a better and more exclamatory statement than a thing done lightly or delicately.

— “Dispatch #5: American Berserk,” for Sinkhole magazine

Dispatch #4: Gradually, and then all of a sudden

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What made the prospect of him continuing to play so alluring an idea for me was not simply the pure aesthetic joy of watching him toil in a fashion so idiosyncratic and stylistically anomalous that it seemed he was playing a different game altogether, but that his familiar presence put me in touch with the person I was a long time ago, a time and a person from which and from whom I am otherwise exceptionally distant.

— “Dispatch #4: Gradually, and then all of a sudden,” for Sinkhole magazine

Dispatch #3: The sense of an ending

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Who tells the future Hall of Famer that his time is up? Is it up to the future Hall of Famer to know it himself? That’s what leads, of course, to potentially uncomfortable situations like this one. But maybe there isn’t another way. Maybe that fire which made a player like Ichiro as good as he for so long was is the same heat which prevents such individuals from giving up the fight until they’re forced to do so.

— “Dispatch #3: The sense of an ending,” for Sinkhole magazine