cover image Twelve Branches: Stories from St. Paul

Twelve Branches: Stories from St. Paul

Nora Murphy. Coffee House Press, $10 (191pp) ISBN 978-1-56689-140-0

This short story collection about life in St. Paul, Minn., offers an unconventional approach to regional fiction. Though four authors share official credit for the tales, the stories are actually based on the real-life experiences of city residents, which the authors gathered at St. Paul libraries. The entry that comes closest to embodying the collaborative ideal is Eleven Ways to Live in the City, which presents a series of snippets and vignettes on 11 different city characters, from a voyeur who delights in dressing up as a cop to a damaged woman who goes off her medication and begins sewing a brilliant quilt. A Working History of the Alley takes a similar but more elegiac approach, tracing a few hours in the lives of three residents who live along the same alleyway: an elderly Polish immigrant who writes a letter to a boyhood friend pondering his impending death; an undocumented immigrant from Mexico who is about to give birth; and a boy speeding by on his bicycle, about to meet his father, who s been in prison for all of the boy s short life. Translations describes a Cambodian family trying to construct a new life after fleeing Pol Pot s regime. The Fat-Brush Artist follows a painter working on the renovation of the downtown St. Paul library, who takes on a troubled young assistant and is shocked to learn that the youth has been an accomplice in a murder. Told in clean, assured and surprisingly consistent prose, this innovative collection should appeal to readers in the Twin Cities and beyond. (Apr.)