Flight brings ten stories together, often drawing us into landscapes so foreign that they defy what we know of our daily reality. We're with the fattest woman on earth as she draws her last breaths and her soul ascends toward its final reward. We meet a divorcee who can fly for no more effort than flapping her arms. We follow a middle-aged butler whose love affair with a young woman leads him first to the mysteries of bondage, and then to the pleasures of malice. Story by story, we set foot into worlds so strange as to seem all but surreal, yet everything feels familiar, each moment rings true. And that’s when we recognize we’re in the hands of one of America’s truly original talents.
About the Author
J. Boyer is a writer and a teacher, not always in that order. To learn more about his career, visit his website at Arizona State University or find him in the International Movie Database. Named Arizona's professor of the year by the Carnegie Foundation, a faculty member in Arizona State University's creative writing program for more than twenty-five years, J. Boyer is primarily known as a playwright and a teacher. His plays have been produced in Europe and Canada, as well as throughout America, many of them off-off-Broadway, and they have won honors both here and abroad. But he is equally adept as a fiction writer. During this same quarter century his stories have been honored internationally and published in some of the literary world’s most prestigious journals.
Praise
“What strikes me as most memorable about J. Boyer's collection Flight is his clear affection for both his characters and the prose that illuminates their lives--traits missing in most fiction published today. Boyer's stories resonate with both humanity and necessity, and not a single story in this collection disappoints. One character after another will stay with you long after their fictive moment in the sun and it makes me yearn for more stories such as those contained here... Flight will capture your heart.”
—Paul Cook, author of Duende Meadow and The Engines of Dawn
"J. Boyer is many writers in one: a magisterial and mercurial stylist, and synthesizer of styles (who else could sound so like Henry James and Gabriel Garcia Marquez in the course of a single sentence?); a spinner of engaging and challenging yarns; a dramatist, who deploys dialogue with precise deftness and builds scenes as solid as the Parthenon; and, most importantly, a sage who wrestles with the most profound secrets of human existence. Flight is fiction of the highest order, by a thoroughly realized writer who has both evolved and perfected his work via years of simply writing, and simply living a life."
—T. R. Hummer, author of Ephemeron, former editor of The Kenyon Review
