Tenney's Landing

The evolution of a landscape and its inhabitants binds together the tales in this eloquent, emotionally authentic debut, set in a fictional Pennsylvania river town. For the denizens of once-prosperous Tenney's Landing, the past remains at hand: prodigals both fleeing and returning explore the repercussions of childhood cruelties, tragic accidents and betrayals, as well as acts of kindness and heroism. "A clean break, wasn't that what she wanted? As if such a thing existed, as if fate might slip you a little silver hatchet and let you cut yourself free," muses the narrator of "The Springhouse," a woman who leaves her emotionally remote husband in Chicago and circles back to her parents' home. In "Jordan's Stand," a relative newcomer is appointed surrogate deer hunter by her elderly friend and neighbor, Jordan Eastman. Perched in a tree, she awaits her prey, pondering her husband's death and her new connections: "I think my widowhood draws us closer, as if the confluence of grief and old age were inevitable." Elizabeth Tenney, the protagonist in "Where the Devil Lost His Blanket," accompanies her Colombian neighbor's remains home to Bogotá in a story that highlights her provincialism at the same time it imbues her prosaic life with meaning. Rendered in graceful prose and abounding with epiphanies, Tudish's stories make a lovely, mournful collection. Agent, Nat Sobel . (June)