Description
“The varied tales in Highwire Act are clear-eyed in their outlooks on current and future calamities. Whether they’re earthbound or science fiction, there’s no escaping the severity of these tales—or the realism of their visions…”
–Foreword
2022 Hudson Prize Winner
A young couple raises crickets for food, a woman in a caged complex is witness to the deterioration of her neighbor, a homeless man contemplates an infant’s grave from the Westward Expansion, and an uncompromising ego takes on a Biblical rain. These are among the stories from Highwire Act & Other Tales of Survival, where the climate crisis arrives not just as strange and violent weather, but as upheavals in our political and emotional climates as well. As characters struggle for survival with Covid, ecological destruction, grief, or mental illness, they attempt to find solace and restoration from a nature that is increasingly no longer in a position to give back. And with science unable to keep up, fake suicides, fairy tales, and delusion are the thorny tools humans are left with to carry on, yet carry on they do.
