Carry You
Winner of the 2017 Fiction Contest, selected by Amina Gautier
Carry You
Winner of the 2017 Fiction Contest, selected by Amina Gautier
About the Book
Glori Simmons’s new book, Carry You, is a timely collection of linked short stories that examines how war shapes and distorts our understanding of family, friends, country, and self. Simmons draws out the humanity of her characters, their flaws and failings, their hopes and desires, and their dreams for the future. These stories show that the human capacity for violence, compassion, and love are not bound by time or place.
Praise for Carry You
Carry You is an intense read, a linked collection of finely intertwined stories expertly dealing with the intricate nature of blame, complicity, duty and war. These stories are masterful without being heavy-handed. Each story in this collection is a satisfaction.
—Amina GautierIn her deeply empathetic new collection, Carry You, Glori Simmons seamlessly transports us between the disparate landscapes of Iraq and America’s Pacific Coast. Along the way, we learn that people are more similar than different, humanity linked by the grace of the human heart. There is no more important lesson in our tumultuous times. Carry You proves redemption knows no boundaries.
—Quan BarryCarry You is a gorgeous, moving investigation into violence and the way that it warps us. From Iraqi to American, from soldier to museum conservator, Simmons’s characters evoke the gravity of war and its inevitable breaking of the ties we hold most dear: family, friends, country—even the tie between self and basic decency. Carry You is void of sloganeering, void of easy answers, but clear-eyed in its evocation of a war in which there are no winners.
—Scott Hutchins