All the Ordinary Pictures and Other Stories

Have you ever seen what happens to a house plant left out in the wintery cold? It suffers what I can only imagine is an agonizing, belittling death. First the leaves slacken then wither while all the stems shrivel. Then the plant browns, sags completely, before turning utterly black like a plague corpse. That's what I felt like when I understood my father shot the photo of the girl on the cover of Gentlemen Club, shot all the photos of all the girls in those magazines sitting above my head all those years. I didn't even have to look at the rest to know that much. The years, angles, and numbers added up. My father was a pornographer.

In this blending of light and dark genres, Scott Rhuin assembles a breakout collection of fiction that courses through the lives of subtle yet indelible characters meeting extraordinary circumstances, like teenager Sam Lewiston, who, in the title story "All the Ordinary Pictures," mistakenly discovers her father's true profession is that of an erotic photographer and not the local photojournalist she always admired. The discovery sends Sam into a tailspin of distrust and heartache that lasts a decade before she meets a color-blind artist who shows her just how bright trust can be.

With striking plots and daring imagination, All the Ordinary Pictures and Other Stories brings readers into the tangled hearts and tested relationships of broken people trying for new beginnings...and sometimes failing. They are the stories of ordinary people navigating the extraordinary instances of love, death, regret, murder, redemption, and hope. Mostly hope.

Dettagli