Hurry Home

Ann Scott Knight

Praise For Ann Scott Knight

“Hurry Home is a book with a sense of narrative urgency. These stories are clean and spare, passionate and direct about the facts of life, particularly love and riches and the way they don’t always go together.”

– Charles Baxter

“This collection of 10 short stories and a novella mines familiar territory, with small-town, middle-class protagonists facing problems like divorce, sexual harassment, peer pressure and jealousy. While the title novella skillfully captures the roiling emotions of a 14-year-old girl as her family crumbles around her, most of the other stories start strong and then wander off into vaguely ominous but essentially unsatisfying endings. Ann Scott Knight’s narrators are often outsiders; they peer in at the relationships of others from afar. At the same time, most are preoccupied with intense navel-gazing. In the stronger, tighter stories here, Knight leaves this beaten path — ‘The Man With Pointed Ears,’ for example, is an odd psychological snapshot of a man who is changed by his encounter with an alien, and ‘A Business Trip’ is an ambitious story about an American academic, headed for Japan, who meets an old high school friend in the airport. Once they are in Tokyo, the friends’ mysterious doings are punctuated by violence and self-discovery. In ‘Thin Air,’ the collection’s most memorable piece, the narrator is a world-weary woman whose imaginary affair with a New York bookstore clerk is built up brick by brick in her mind through stolen glances, mental dialogue, the man’s taste in literature and her own vivid fantasizing. Here is the troubled girl of the novella, now grown up, still unsure of herself despite her experience, still looking in from the outside and still all too aware that there are no easy solutions to life’s emotional puzzles.”