Children of God — David H. Lynn

Widely known as a masterful storyteller, David H. Lynn is also the highly regarded editor of The Kenyon Review. In this probing collection of new and selected stories, Lynn brings his keen eye and astute sense of drama and narrative to bear on the complex currents of human existence, exploring how the ideas we use to give purpose to our lives, whether they be modest or grand, are all too often set on unstable terrain. In the O Henry Award-winning Divergence a college professor discovers after a freak cycling accident that the carefully assembled details of the most treasured part of his life, his thoughts and emotions, have been irretrievably altered . . . and along with them everything he ever knew about himself. In Mistaken Identity a poet frequently taken for a more famous counterpart of the same name, makes a rash decision to fraudulently accept an invitation for a reading tour in India in a desperate attempt to remake her life. And in the title story, a playful exchange turns menacing as an American child in Delhi has his sense of normalcy overturned when he learns the hard way that privilege has its limits. As Flannery O Connor Prize Series Editor, Nancy Zafris, puts it: "...these stories dare to assume multiple cultural identities. They dare to assume the reader of being sophisticated and curious, as intelligent and thrilled by language as the author himself." From his first volume, Fortune Telling (1998), to his most recent, Year of Fire and Other Stories (2006), this collection presents thirteen stories from "A master of the ambivalent resolution" (Ellen Loughran, Booklist), displaying a breadth of cultural insight and emotional resonance that lovers of the short story won't soon forget.