Blue of the World

"There are coastal mountains plunging headlong into the sea. There are towering trees and hills teeming with life. Birds in the sky and fish in the rivers. Everywhere all at once. Yet there's also this: an dead expanse of nothing at the center of the world. Every inch identical to the inch before and after . . . Where is there any evidence to prove that God did not simply give up?"

In Blue of the World, Pushcart Prize-winner Douglas W. Milliken's latest collection of eerie and unsettling short stories, ordinary people alternately seek and flee grace as they blindly run against the unfathomable mysteries of sexuality and loss: a dementia-ridden mother expounds on quantum physics to someone she is unconvinced is her son, a young man repeatedly tries and fails to end his own life, and the owner of a horse farm communes with the ghost of the woman he loves " . . . because memory is a debt with its own black interest, proving all distances are finite yet impossible to span." Yet Blue of the World is also a devastating portrait of humanity's complex relationship with a brutally beautiful landscape--a world where apple trees grow in salted sand, people seek oblivion "by smashing a hole through a river's ice and climbing under the crystalline sheet," and arboreal death by chainsaw seemingly lurks behind any workday misstep.