"Our great Western myth is that we are a people predisposed to progress, to forward motion, to action, and it’s true that when we tell our stories, if we’re good at telling our stories, we learn to give our listeners what they’re listening for, what Aristotle called What Happens Next. Action is eloquence, Shakespeare said. And yet so much happens between the action, in the quiet, between our ears, among the Hows and Whys and What Ifs we can articulate, and the Huhs we can’t.
'But when night came,' Benjamin Percy writes, 'when there was no more racket, no sunshine, no neighbors ringing the doorbell to hand him peach pies and hamburger casseroles – crying came with it.'
Here we must consult our great philosopher from Alabama, one Charles Barkley: If ifs were gifts, every day would be Christmas.
Indeed. And don’t the writers in this volume know it. Here, instead of Christmas, we get an empty house, the dry cleaners, a burn unit, a garden plot, an emergency animal hospital. The Kansas Department of Corrections and Osawatomie State Hospital. The rehabilitation center at Muskego and the Indian Arm fjord. All the places—often somber, often solitary, often static—in which we must wait the other 364 days a year."
— by Kyle Minor
"Visiting Hours unhinges our anxieties about illness. These stories are funny, touching, and buoyed high by the surprising twists of human love. Thank goodness for a book that paints bright, savvy colors on white hospital walls.
— Alyson Hagy, author of Snow, Ashes (Graywolf, 2007)
"Why aren't there more books like this one? This anthology is alive, and it's electric. Every piece in here is full of heart and packed with surprise. Dan Wickett has done a great job of finding work by writers who matter. Here's to him--and to them."
— Steve Yarbrough, author of The End of California (Knopf, 2006)
