“Nancy Allen is a gorgeous writer, deft with the use of telling and power-packed poetic verbs and wise in her ability to see deep into the soul of a character and know how a single event can change them.”
Description
The lush and layered stories in this delightful debut stretch from the deep darkness of Carlsbad Caverns to the light of desert stars.
In Nancy J. Allen’s fierce first collection, A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes, the extraordinary emerges from the everyday. Allen’s stories are informed by the vast landscapes of New Mexico and Texas, and in them the mythic and the mundane intertwine: two neighbors burn a grandson’s letters from Vietnam in a backyard grill; a child vanishes into the maze of Albuquerque’s fabled Alvarado Hotel; a sculptor meets her younger self in the eerie stillness of a theater lobby. These are only a few of the unforgettable, mysterious moments that mark the arrival of a bold new voice in contemporary Southwest fiction.
Reviews
“Packed with raw emotional power, A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes is intelligent, at times heart-pumping, and always courageous.”
“I love Nancy Allen’s masterful stories so very much, stories that seem effortless in their beauty, their power, their wisdom, and not least, their humor. Allen, with a poet’s ear and eye, gets at the essence of her characters and their landscapes. It seems to me miraculous the way the stories move through time and space, Allen gracefully driving her narratives ever forward to their surprising, their poignant, their beautiful endings.”
“This superb story collection marks the debut of a rare and talented writer who should have gotten her due a long time ago. But now, finally, we have in A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes eleven gorgeous stories. Here you will find fireworks both literal and figurative, along with rocket science, gushing oil wells, good sex, mean girls, sun-splitting Mayan ruins, family, love, loss, and pretty much all the rest of the human tumble, delivered in prose that seems to crackle straight from the writer’s nerve endings onto the page. This is short fiction of the highest order.”
