Discovering the World Thirteen Stories

Thomas Jeffrey Vasseur steeps us in different experiences set in a disappearing rural South, the New South, & the world at large. One of the striking things here is storytelling variety: a little boy discovers the wonder & allure of flight; a ballet dancer from Texas falls in love; a Southern native meets a Vietnam veteran & sailboat builder who takes him to French Polynesia, a Kentucky choir minister adopts a disturbed, trouble-causing son. These tales of passion are full of peril & recurrent awareness of mortality, the gaps that separate all people & threaten to separate them further from those they love. This collection devotes itself strongly to a sense of place, both personal & collective history, some lyrical & some hard truths about the various regions & locales that inspired it. In its variety of modes & themes--city versus country life, sexual desire & parenthood, our very American pursuit of earthly happiness & our resilient faith in God--Discovering the World is a collection which probes the nooks & crannies of the human heart. Advance Praise for Discovering the World: Collected Stories: These stories are some of the most sophisticated Southern stories I've ever read. Sophisticated in that the subjects & characters have universal appeal. And what's best about Vasseur is that he can write.--Janice Daugharty, Pulitzer Prize nominee, & author of Like a Sister & Earl in the Yellow Shirt: A Novel. Discovering the World is a wonderfully diverse collection. I read one story, marvelling at its comic, angry speed, pockets of light & dark like sunlight filtered into a forest, & said: this is Southern. The short story "Pig Summer" really blew me away. I read another, & thought this is Balzac in our century, the quiet surface of ordinary lives belying the frantic crosscurrents underneath. & the stories set in France seem both ancient & radically new.--Debra Monroe, winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Fiction, & author of "The Source of Trouble," "A Wild, Cold State" & "Newfangled."Vasseur, Thomas Jeffrey is the author of 'Discovering the World Thirteen Stories' with ISBN 9780865547186 and ISBN 0865547181.