Gravity Changes

by Zach Powers

Overview

WINNER OF THE BOA SHORT FICTION PRIZE
ON THE WASHINGTON POST'S 2017 'A SUMMER BOOK LIST LIKE NO OTHER'

Gravity Changes is a collection of fantastical, off-beat stories that view the quotidian world through the lens of the absurd. Set in a surreal, fictional world that is populated by strange, fascinating characters—children who defy gravity, a man who marries a light bulb, the Devil and his ex-wife—these stories take wide steps outside of reality, finding new ways to illuminate truth.

Zach Powers lives and writes in Savannah, Georgia. The co-founder of the literary arts nonprofit Seersucker Live, his promotional writing for television has won an Emmy Award, and he is currently a columnist for Savannah Morning News.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781942683377
Publisher:	BOA Editions, Ltd.
Publication date:	05/16/2017
Series:	American Readers Series
Pages:	176
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Zach Powers lives and writes in Savannah, Georgia. Winner of the BOA Short Fiction Prize, his work has appeared in Black Warrior Review, Forklift, Ohio, PANK, Caketrain, and elsewhere. He is the co-founder of the literary arts nonprofit Seersucker Live, and leads the writers’ workshop at the Flannery O’Connor Childhood Home, where he also served on the board of directors. His promotional writing for television won an Emmy, and he is a former columnist for Savannah Morning News.

Table of Contents

Gravity Changes

a tinkle is the sound of two things meeting but failing to merge

Joan Plays Power Ballads with Slightly Revised Lyrics

Children in Alaska

The Eating Habits of Famous Actors

Single

Cockpuncher

The Tunnels They Dig

When as Children We Acted Memorably

Use Your Spoon

This Next Song

One Has Hugs the Other Punches

The Loneliness of Large Bathrooms

Little Gray Moon

Extispicy

Unlearn to Seek

Undertaken

Sleeping Bears

My 9/11 Story

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“A wonderfully vertiginous, through-the-looking-glass story collection, packed with Powers’s one-of-a-kind humor and insight. With his extraordinary imagination and vitalizing prose, Powers can make anything live, and does. He is fluently conversant with the Devil, the dead, children, animals, astronauts, and newlyweds—and this is just a partial roster of the wild crew aboard this ship. Goofy and profound, lyrical and exhilarating, Gravity Changes is a thrilling, rocket-fueled debut.”

—Karen Russell

“Here is a collection for those in love with language, in love with wonder, and in love with the transformative power of storytelling. These stories will make you laugh and cry and wonder how exactly Zach Powers does it. Powers is brilliant, an ecstatic and exciting new voice.”

—Bryan Hurt

“Gravity Changes is an unceasingly inventive and sharply observed collection of short stories. In it, Powers paints a quirky, skewed world, but one that's wholly recognizable. Readers will encounter characters who defy gravity, lightbulbs incarnate, portals to other dimensions, and co-workers who read messages of guilt etched on one another's foreheads. The collection is darkly comic, and sometimes otherworldly, but always perceptive, exploring a landscape of human emotions: loss, longing, loneliness, and nostalgia. Fantastical and hilarious, profound and melancholy, Gravity Changes is a force of nature, and Zach Powers is a major talent to watch.”

—Sarah Domet

Editorial Reviews

03/20/2017
The 19 fantastical stories in this engaging collection bend the laws of physics and fiction to leave lasting impressions. In the title story, children defy the laws of gravity before the onset of adulthood drags them reluctantly back to earth. A man struggles to save his marriage to a giant light bulb in “Children in Alaska,” while a tiny moon courts a woman by orbiting her body in the charming, one-page “Little Gray Moon.” Stories like “This Next Song,” about a doomed date between two men, still manage to integrate hints of the fantastic, departing from the collection’s established mode without abandoning it entirely. The collection’s longest piece, “Sleeping Bears,” is also its strongest, turning a clever metaphor for transparency in the age of social media into a funny, affecting examination of modern workplace dynamics. Powers excels in his earnest care for his characters and a willingness to test out every idea, whether or not it’s likely to soar. (May)

Publishers Weekly

A wonderfully vertiginous, through-the-looking-glass story collection, packed with Powers’s one-of-a-kind humor and insight. With his extraordinary imagination and vitalizing prose, Powers can make anything live, and does. He is fluently conversant with the Devil, the dead, children, animals, astronauts, and newlyweds—and this is just a partial roster of the wild crew aboard this ship. Goofy and profound, lyrical and exhilarating, Gravity Changes is a thrilling, rocket-fueled debut.”

—Karen Russell

“Here is a collection for those in love with language, in love with wonder, and in love with the transformative power of storytelling. These stories will make you laugh and cry and wonder how exactly Zach Powers does it. Powers is brilliant, an ecstatic and exciting new voice.”

—Bryan Hurt

“Gravity Changes is an unceasingly inventive and sharply observed collection of short stories. In it, Powers paints a quirky, skewed world, but one that's wholly recognizable. Readers will encounter characters who defy gravity, lightbulbs incarnate, portals to other dimensions, and co-workers who read messages of guilt etched on one another's foreheads. The collection is darkly comic, and sometimes otherworldly, but always perceptive, exploring a landscape of human emotions: loss, longing, loneliness, and nostalgia. Fantastical and hilarious, profound and melancholy, Gravity Changes is a force of nature, and Zach Powers is a major talent to watch.”

—Sarah Domet

From the Publisher

★ 2017-03-07
Flying children, lovely light bulbs, and unusually expressive faces are just some of the wonders that populate the world of Powers' debut short story collection.While each of Powers' brief tales is a treasure trove of whimsical surrealism, it's his uncompromising and often melancholy view of human nature that holds this collection together. The stories, which range in length from brief vignettes to longer narratives, bring the reader closer to the emotional reality of life by distorting the mundane reality of our world. What do leftover characters do with themselves when their action movie is over and the hero is dead? Can a woman single-handedly shrink the universe? Can a moon be in love with a girl? What is it like to be married to the devil? Each story presents a different twist; sometimes it is magical, like a man who becomes one with his couch, and sometimes it is more dreamlike, like a morbid children's game. Sometimes the difference between the magic and the dreams is not quite clear. It takes a few pages to find secure footing in this uncanny universe, but Powers' clean, no-frills prose keeps what could otherwise be a disorienting roller coaster grounded and clear. If some of the stories require a second reading, it's not because Powers strays too far down the rabbit hole but because they're too provocative to release their hold on the reader all at once. And if any of the glimpses into this world, a place wholly different and yet somehow recognizable as our own, are too peculiar to evoke their roots in truth, the next one is never too far away. A fanciful take on life, love, tragedy, and human connection that draws its strength from insight instead of artifice.

Kirkus Reviews