DEER & Other Stories

(For Immediate Release – September 2009) DEER & Other Stories is a luminous debut fiction collection that burns darkly. The deer that populate these 11 stories, whether real deer or imagined, made of skin and blood and bone, used as plastic lawn ornaments, even a wire stage prop, pad in and out of the character’s lives as mirror-images reflecting all the beauty, splendor and fear both species engender.

· In The Grass Eye a boy is sent to live at his grandparents’ crumbling Italian villa after his mother has a breakdown, where he meets a German boy he suspects of being a Nazi.

· Within You Without You tells the story of a woman who had once been part of an entourage that traveled to India with the Beatles.

· A psychiatrist in Help, battling his obsession with a former patient, mythologizes her into strange incarnations.

· On leave from Vietnam, a soldier in Remember Hardy is tormented by visions of deer starving over the Long Island winter.

More Praise for Deer & Other Stories ~

SusanTepper notices more detail at breakfast than most of us do all day, and her stories brim with surprise thanks to her characters’ immersion in what it means to live.

—Mark Wisniewski, Confessions of a Polish Used Car Salesman

In each of these accomplished stories an enigmatic deer appears… we are struck by the craft of Susan Tepper’s writing, her embrace of eccentricity, the beauty and the warts, and the seamless intermingling of the lightness and darkness of being.—Doug Holder, Boston Small Press Scene

Susan Tepper… has written a collection of short stories as quirky as her life so far... and the deer in the title appears in the stories as a kind of leitmotif… suddenly darting into your path, to haunt the story…— Saul Friedman, NEWSDAY

The stories in DEER are terrific, many remind me of Hemingway’s “In Our Time”: the woods, the war, the indirection... —Robert Viscusi, Astoria (American Book Award)


WILDERNESS HOUSE PRESS

Steve Glines, Publisher 145 Foster Street, Littleton MA (952) 633-3460
Or www.susantepper.com
Publication date: OCTOBER, 2009 ISBN 978-0-578-02479-0
Fiction, $16.95 INGRAM