Last Respects and Other Stories

A middle-aged couple on a a trip west brought to a halt by the memory of a college-aged sweetheart whose tomb they must find; an old lady visited by the memory of a lynching she didn't quite witness; a trip across Texas, and back in time, in the teeth of a snowstorm; a scattering of ashes and a pocketing of small beloved bones.This is a selection of the best short stories of novelist Lamar Herrin, collected here for the first time in a single volume. These are stories mostly on the move, the highways, the motels, the farms, the lonely gas stations, the small towns of a vast mid-America - these provide the stage across which a diverse group of characters travel, one eye behind them on a past which no longer exists and an eye ahead on a future haunted before they get there. Echoes of Faulkner, Eudora Welty, James Salter, the beauty that was, the fading traces of which still lure these people on***********LAMAR HERRIN is the author of eight novels including "The Rio Loja Ringmaster" (1977), "American Baroque" (1981), "The Unwritten Chronicles of Robert E. Lee" (1990) and "The Lies Boys Tell", which became a 1994 made-for-television drama starring Kirk Douglas. More recently, "Fractures" (2013), "Father Figure" (2016) and "Fishing the Jumps", soon to be published by The University of Kentucky Press. His works also include "Romancing Spain", a memoir on how he met and fell in love with Amparo, his Spanish wife of forty years. His short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, Epoch and The Paris Review, which awarded him its Aga Kahn fiction prize. He is professor emeritus at Cornell University, where he taught creative writing and contemporary literature, and directed the university's program in Spain. His writing often shows an intimate knowledge of Spanish geography, history, art and tradition. Two of his novels have been translated into Spanish, namely "The Lies Boys Tell" ("Las mentiras que cuentan los ninos") and "House of the Deaf" ("La casa de los sordos", Chaman Ediciones, 2017), the story of one man's brush with Basque terrorism and his quest to find answers. He and his wife split their time between Ithaca, New York and Valencia.www.lamarherrin.com**************PRAISE FOR LAMAR HERRIN WRITING"Father Figure""What a remarkable, evocative book. Lamar Herrin is a consummate story-teller, and Father Figure is a richly imagined American story - of patrimony and baseball and war and the inheritance of history's wounds - told with great physical immediacy and a seemingly effortless emotional intensity." - Philip Gourevitch, author of The Ballad of Abu Ghraib."Fractures""Here's and environmental novel that does just what you want it to do: Frame an important contemporary debate in profoundly human terms... Plenty of readers will enjoy Herrin's book for its lustrous writing and poignant insight into the challenge of building a life worth living. But if you also want a novel that addresses a pressing political and environmental issue, Fractures is worth exploring." - Ron Charles, The Washington Post"House of the Deaf""Lamar Herrin redefines vengeance and innocence in House of the Deaf, a tale of political violence in which the life-blood of the spirit confronts the cold blood of the terrorist - a finely wrought novel of near-mystical dimension." - William Kennedy"The Lies Boys Tell""A work of unusual lyrical and moral beauty, of challenging metaphorical complexity." - The New York Times Book Review"Romancing Spain""[An] extraordinary love story... Herrin has plotted this book like a suspenseful novel. It succeeds as a unique love story and as an evocation of Spain: its sweeping plateau and fragrant orange orchards, its great regional foods and attentive formalities." - The Louisville Courier-Journal"The Unwritten Chronicles of Robert E. Lee""A work of great imagination and care, unburdened by the usual conventions." - James Salter