What I Found Out About Her: Stories of Dreaming American, winner of the 2014 Richard Sullivan Prize in Short Fiction, reaffirms Peter LaSalle's reputation as one of the most startlingly original writers working in the short fiction genre today. In this collection of eleven stories, LaSalle explores how everyday life for many―an FBI agent, a study-abroad student, a drug dealer's chic girlfriend, a trio of Broadway playwrights, among others―can often take on something much larger than that, almost the texture of a haunting dream. Marked by stylistic daring and a rare lyricism in language, this is intense, thoroughly moving fiction that probes the contemporary American psyche, portraying it in all its frequently painful sadness and also its brave and unflagging hope.

What I Found Out About Her: Stories of Dreaming Americans (Richard Sullivan Prize in Short Fiction)

Literature & Fiction

LaSalle, Peter

United States

University of Notre Dame Press

The World Is a Book, Indeed: Writing, Reading, and Traveling

Essays & Correspondence

LSU Press

To be untethered in the waking world, to have the feeling that perhaps we are sleepwalking―that’s what life can be like for the people in these eleven stories by Peter LaSalle, known to readers of leading literary magazines for his luminous prose style and narrative daring.The characters range from a fragile, and very rich, Mount Holyoke College girl in Paris to an out-of-work American businessman caught up in an international financial scam in Buenos Aires; from a happy-go-lucky old piano-lounge performer, once famous in all the New England seaside resorts, to a quartet of passengers on a bus barreling across the Mexican desert on Christmas Eve―and heading right toward a nightmarish encounter indeed on the road. In one story, a troubled guy who is somehow both himself on a hockey scholarship at Harvard in the sixties and himself a few decades later, meets his beautiful lost girlfriend at a long-gone Cambridge cafeteria. The busboys become hovering angels. Time slips backward and forward. Things that happened may not have happened.While rich with specific detail of character and place, these stories also tap into the stranger kind of clarity that does come, paradoxically, from subtle disorientation, as found in innovators like Nabokov and Borges. LaSalle’s lovely, rhythmic sentences, in which an aside can sometimes be the central concern, create a captivating permeability in the boundary between real and unreal while always enchanting with their power simply to tell a moving story. This is very original short fiction that aspires to nothing less than reasserting the wonderful possibilities of the genre―or, as the narrator of the story “The End of Narrative” ultimately suggests: “Maybe narrative hadn’t ended, which is to say, hasn’t ended.”

Tell Borges If You See Him: Tales of Contemporary Somnambulism (Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction)

University of Georgia Press

Pretty, twenty-year-old Mariposa has entered the U.S. from Honduras by way of Nuevo Laredo, without documentation. She now serves drinks and woos customers as a B-girl—sort of a dime-a-dance arrangement—in a shabby nightclub on the east side of Austin, Texas. Rough work, it's at least giving her a start in America.Between the norteño and cumbia songs the DJ plays, a smooth-talking Anglo out-of-towner who calls himself Bill shows up at the club one Saturday night to sit and casually chat with Mariposa. He smiles and sympathizes; his flattery leads her to reveal the secret pain she has kept hidden so long. But Mariposa has no way of knowing that he's being hunted by police throughout the Southwest.Even in Austin, far from the border, there are dangers more sinister than narcotraficantes or la migra.LaSalle’s intense, haunting novel beckons readers into the shadowy lives of undocumented workers in the U.S. and the difficult choices they must face. Written as a single book-length sentence, Mariposa's Song is also a truly innovative achievement in the novel form itself, as it continually startles and satisfies with stylistic daring and sheer lyrical radiance.

Mariposa’s Song: A Novel (The Americas)

Texas Tech University Press

Strange sunlight: A novel

Texas Monthly Press

Literary short stories on the place of ice hockey in our lives and imaginations.

Hockey Sur Glace: Stories

Genre Fiction

Breakaway Books

In The City at Three PM, award-winning fiction writer Peter LaSalle offers 11 startlingly original personal essays dealing with his longtime quest for world travel of the literary sort. The range of offbeat experiences is wide—from driving recklessly across the county when young to seek out Saul Bellow in Chicago, to settling in for long evenings at a pub in Dublin with Christy Brown, the celebrated Irish author afflicted with cerebral palsy who typed with his toes and was the subject of the movie My Left Foot. In Buenos Aires LaSalle senses metaphysical transport while investigating Borges's work; in Cameroon he attends the wonderful opening of a small bookstore; in Hollywood he finds himself caught in a crazy mob scene while researching the work of 1930s master novelist and screenwriter Nathanael West; in Tunisia he follows in the footsteps of Flaubert at the ruins of ancient Carthage. And those are just some of the adventures. Having first appeared in distinguished publications here and abroad, including The Best American Travel Writing, these are beautifully crafted pieces—heartfelt, honest, observant—that conjure up those fine moments when travel does intersect with the important role of literature in our lives.

The City at Three P.M.: Writing, Reading, and Traveling

Travel

Europe

Dzanc Books

LaSalle’s [stories] transcend their particulars to show people with dreams, dilemmas, and disappointments that will move any reader.” Jhumpa Lahiri, Harvard ReviewHaunting and evocative. . . . LaSalle’s prose is lyrical, at times rhapsodic, and his characters memorable.” Kirkus Reviews (starred review)The twelve stories of Sleeping Mask, written in propulsive, fluid prose, introduce readers to remarkable characters. They include a child soldier sent to raid a girls’ boarding school, a Virginia Woolf scholar surviving cancer, a desperate writer living under fascism in a futuristic Latin America, the spirits of recently deceased college students on a tour of the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, and a middle-aged man transported back to his childhood, where he is led out to sea by his mother’s ghost.LaSalle’s tantalizing fictions” are evocative of many of the great innovators of postmodern literature, from Borges to Nabokov, while charting a path entirely their own. Through all of their stylistic pyrotechnics these stories never forsake rich characterization and plotting to probe the deepest parts of the contemporary human condition, such as the nature of erotic desire, the legacy of art and artistry, the power of grief and fear, and the horror of war and violence.Peter LaSalle is the author of several books of fiction, including the story collections Tell Borges If You See Him, recipient of he Flannery O’Connor Award, and What I Found Out About Her, winner of the Richard Sullivan Prize in Short Fiction. He lives in Austin, Texas, where he is a member of the creative writing faculty at the University of Texas, and Narragansett, in his native Rhode Island.

Sleeping Mask: Fictions

Bellevue Literary Press

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Books by LaSalle, Peter