Friday Freebie: Catch, Release by Adrianne Harun

Congratulations to Carl Scott, winner of last week’s Friday Freebie: Evergreen Tidings From the Baumgartners by Gretchen Anthony.

This week’s giveaway is for Catch, Release, the new short-story collection by Adrianne Harun, author of A Man Came Out of a Door in the Mountain. Tim O’Brien had this to say about the new story collection: “Catch, Release is brilliant. Masterly brilliant. Tour de force brilliant―the crystalline prose, the characters who dive off the page and splash down into the reader’s heart, the islands and water and sunlight and sand and trees that are as astonishingly real as last night’s dreamscape, the moral complexities and contradictions of human beings in contest with the devil, the pitch-perfect sounds of desperation and joy and terror and triumph and unspeakable loss, the smells of fish and salt and sand and musty old farmhouses. As a whole―and these wonderful stories demand to be read as a whole―Catch, Release will break your heart and then mend it and then break it again. This book will endure.” Keep scrolling for more information on the book and how to enter the contest. And be sure to check Adrianne’s account of her “first time.”

In Catch, Release, Adrianne Harun’s second story collection, loss is the driver. But it’s less the usual somber shadow-figure of grieving than an erratically interesting cousin, unmoored, even exhilarated, by the sudden flight into emptiness, the freedom of being neither here nor there. In this suspended state, anything might happen―and it does. Harun’s most realistic stories are suffused with mystery, while her more fantastic tales reveal startling truths within the commonplace. In diverse settings that include, among other places, a British Columbian island, a haunted Midwestern farmhouse, a London townhome, and a dementia care facility overpopulated with dangerously idle guardian angels, characters reconfigure whole worlds as they navigate states defined by absence. In “The Farmhouse Wife,” a young couple, struggling financially, takes up residence in a near-abandoned farmhouse, only to be joined by an inconvenient roommate, a woman whose own bereft state proves perilously seductive. A kleptomaniac father gets caught in one of his petty thefts in “Pearl Diving,” propelling his two sons out of one life into another, perhaps more appropriate, one. In “Madame Ida,” a family of little girls steadily invades a woman’s life as she puzzles out the mysteries of a missing sheriff-turned-cult-leader and the absence of her own son. And in the title story, two teenagers face off against the hurtful lies of an ancient con woman who is mining a widow’s grief for her own ends. Adrianne Harun has been described as an exacting and attentive stylist whose stories are rendered in vivid language. The Los Angeles Review of Books wrote of her work: “Harun finds beauty in pitch black; she makes poetry out of brutality and grace out of terror. She is an alchemist, turning the worst aspects of life into gold.” With Catch, Release, Harun upends the world once more.

If you’d like a chance at winning Catch, Release, simply email your name and mailing address to

thequiveringpen@gmail.com

Put FRIDAY FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line. Please include your mailing address in the body of the e-mail. One entry per person, please. This contest is open to U.S. addresses only. Despite its name, the Friday Freebie remains open to entries until midnight on Nov. 8, at which time I’ll draw the winning name. I’ll announce the lucky reader on Nov. 9. If you’d like to join the mailing list for the once-a-week newsletter, simply add the words “Sign me up for the newsletter” in the body of your email. Your email address and other personal information will never be sold or given to a third party (except in those instances where the publisher requires a mailing address for sending Friday Freebie winners copies of the book).

Want to double your odds of winning? Get an extra entry in the contest by posting a link to this webpage on your blog, your Facebook wall or by tweeting it on Twitter. Once you’ve done any of those things, send me an additional e-mail saying “I’ve shared” and I’ll put your name in the hat twice.