Scott Garson's AMERICAN GYMNOPÉDIES
“Like Erik Satie’s Gymnopédies, Garson’s atmospheric shorts surprised me with their subtle shifts and eccentricities. Linked by geographic places, the collection progresses in tiny increments to become a dance between internal and external geographies. In perception and execution, this is a wonderfully original work.” —JIM HEYNAN, author of The One-Room Schoolhouse
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In American Gymnopédies, Scott Garson probes switching intersections of time and place and consciousness to offer, in fractured aggregate, a nation inside-out. A salesman in Asheville; a teacher in Wausau; a dispossessed woman in Flagstaff; a single mother in Seattle—each shifts toward an instant of focus within a seemingly antique lens, a charmed instrument that Garson employs in acts of conjuration. In these forty-six narratives, made of a prose as radiant as it is spare, we’re given a ranging alt-history, a strange and exhilarating guide to a life we might never have believed we could know.