What Luck, This Life

by Kathryn Schwille

Overview

The Columbia space shuttle and its contents rain down on the people of Kiser, Texas, in Kathryn Schwille's imaginative debut novel set six weeks before the invasion of Iraq.

What Luck, This Life begins in the aftermath of the space shuttle's break-up, as the people of Piney Woods watch their pastures swarm with searchers and reporters bluster at their doors. A shop owner defends herself against a sexual predator who is pushed to new boldness after he is disinvited to his family reunion. A closeted father facing a divorce that will leave his gifted boy adrift retrieves an astronaut's remains. An engineer who dreams of orbiting earth joins a search for debris and instead uncovers an old neighbor's buried longing.

In a chorus of voices spanning places and years, What Luck, This Life explores the Columbia disaster's surprising fallout for a town beset by the tensions of class, race, and missed opportunity. Evoking Sherwood Anderson's classic Winesburg, Ohio and Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge, the novel's unforgettable characters struggle with family upheaval and mortality's grip and a luminous book emerges-filled with heartache, beauty, and warmth.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781538452721
Publisher:	Blackstone Publishing
Publication date:	09/18/2018
Edition description:	Unabridged
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 7.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Kathryn Schwille's fiction has appeared in New Letters, Memorious, Crazyhorse, West Branch, Sycamore Review, and other literary journals. Her stories have twice received Special Mention in the Pushcart Prize anthology. She was an award-winning newspaper reporter before moving to North Carolina to become an editor at the Charlotte Observer. A graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, she lives with her husband in Charlotte, NC.

Coming soon...

Richard Ferrone has recorded over 150 audiobooks including thrillers, romances, science fiction, and inspirational novels. He has earned an Audie Award and four Audie nominations, including for Best Solo Male Narrator of 2003. He was also recognized as an AudioFile "Voice of the Last Century" and a "Rising and Shining Star." He has earned many AudioFile Earphones Awards and was named the 2011 Best Voice in Mystery and Suspense as well as the 2009 Best Voice in Science Fiction and Fantasy. A science fiction fan, he narrated Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy. He has also narrated works by James Patterson, Dashiell Hammett, Walter Mosley, John Sandford, Eric Van Lustbader, and Stuart Woods.

Stephen Bel Davies has recorded over a hundred titles in association with Audible Studios, Deyan Audio, Brilliance, and Tantor. Trained at the Juilliard School Drama Division, he has narrated books by a number of New York Times bestselling authors.

Prentice Onayemi is an Earphones Award-winning audiobook narrator and a voice and film actor who is known for his roles in The Steam-Room Crooner, AmeriQua, and as Joey in the Tony Award-winning play War Horse.

Scott Aiello has narrated over a dozen audiobooks and is a 2013 Audie Award finalist for his nonfiction narration of Sex and God at Yale by author Nathan Harden. He is a graduate of the Juilliard School drama division and has since performed and directed various New York plays and has been seen on television shows such as Person of Interest and Elementary. Before Juilliard, he was a regular in the Chicago theater circuit.

Michael David Axtell is a voice talent and audiobook narrator.

Jessica B. Harris is one of a handful of African Americans who have achieved prominence in the culinary world. She holds a PhD from NYU, teaches English at Queens College, and lectures internationally. Her articles have appeared in Vogue, Food & Wine, Essence, and the New Yorker, among other publications. She has made numerous television and radio appearances and has been profiled in the New York Times. One of the preeminent scholars of the food of the African Diaspora, she has been inducted into the James Beard Who's Who in Food and Beverage in America, received an honorary doctorate from Johnson & Wales University, holds awards from sources too numerous to note, and has helped the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture to conceptualize its cafeteria.

Amanda Leigh Cobb is a voice talent and Earphones Award-winning narrator.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

Winner: 2019 IPPY Award - Bronze Medal in Literary Fiction

Interviews

With this novel, Schwille has given us a landscape of longings, passions, and heartaches so real and deep we can almost walk around in it. The pieces of the Columbia fall on and bring into relief the whole rich array of lives and dramas that exist in Kiser, Texas--every one of them rendered with remarkable feeling. The result is a powerful portrait of Kiser and of the human condition.

Editorial Reviews

With this novel, Schwille has given us a landscape of longings, passions, and heartaches so real and deep we can almost walk around in it. The pieces of the Columbia fall on and bring into relief the whole rich array of lives and dramas that exist in Kiser, Texas—every one of them rendered with remarkable feeling. The result is a powerful portrait of Kiser and of the human condition.

author of We Show What We Have Learned Clare Beams

A century after the publication of Winesburg, Ohio, Kathryn Schwille has created a similarly unexpected, and unexpectedly moving, portrait of a small town: this one in East Texas, in the wake of a tragedy. Her characters speak from the heart; their troubles and small triumphs speak to all of us.

author of Ship Fever and Archangel Andrea Barrett

What Luck, This Life is an astonishing work of literary talent, surprising at every turn. The novel takes the catastrophe of a space shuttle blowing its fragments across the uninspired landscape of an East Texas town and in the search for remains uncovers a second set of catastrophes and secrets in the lives of the people on the ground. The characters are wild and desperate, but they are also us. For we are all cast out, looking for a return. From the tattered remains of disaster, Schwille creates a glimmering constellation of humanity, a flash of heavenly light. Just thinking about this book makes me feel more alive.

author of Swimming Between Worlds Elaine Neill Orr

"Kaleidoscopic and incredibly moving, What Luck, This Life is the story of a hardscrabble town and the people who call it home. This is a book full of heart and wisdom."

author of The Afterlives Thomas Pierce

2018-07-02
A small town's residents cope with their lives and an American tragedy.A scream comes across the sky, and there's nothing to compare to it in Schwille's quietly contemplative and affecting first novel. On Feb. 1, 2003, the Space Shuttle Columbia exploded near Cape Canaveral, and debris fell into the water. Schwille imagines that debris fell onto Kiser, a "dinky, third-fiddle" east Texas town near Louisiana. She introduces us to a wide array of locals and their simple lives, now interrupted by search and rescue operations. Schwille's narrative is told from widely different points of view and employs subtle time shifts going back and forth across years. "Time," to quote from her Italo Calvino epigraph, "is a catastrophe, perpetual and irreversible." Kiser suffers from drought, unemployment, multiple divorces, damaged soldiers returning from war, meth labs, anti-gay sentiments, domestic violence, and racism. Wes MacFarland tells us Kiser "wasn't one of those storybook places." He's a struggling, tormented, gay tree-service foreman married to a woman named Holly. Their young, troubled son, Frankie, "heard the shuttle come apart" and came across an "orange space suit wedged in the crook of a tall tree...an astronaut's torso inside it." Wes will abandon Kiser, moving to Houston to be with his partner, Ben. Holly will divorce him and marry Pastor Will Simpson, who felt she "had brushed against the devil's ways." "Diabetic, Gandhi-thin" Plato Winchester, a "modern-day Davy Crockett," found "bits of metal, pieces of foam, something he said looked like glass." A "shoe-less foot, missing one big toe" is found beside Junior Pierce's mailbox. Gabe Dixon, a poor African-American man, finds a female hand with a ring on it. "The people of Kiser had spread their arms around [this] disaster and accepted the great burden of its grief.""From a wound, beauty rises" in this modern-day Winesburg, Ohio.

Kirkus Reviews