Springtime on Mars: Stories
Bees swarm. A president is assassinated. A young mother is electrocuted in her own basement. A space shuttle vanishes. One couple is struck by sudden wealth, another by lightning. An older woman obsesses over a bag boy at the local supermarket. People everywhere watch the sky for signs of intelligent life on Mars and covert Russian space missions. The television era begins, and the Vietnam War ends.
Ranging from the 1950s to present time, the stories of Springtime on Mars feature characters who grapple with the human extremes of despair and hope, holding faith in both God and science, and in the love and courage of those around them.
“The stories in Susan Woodring's debut collection Springtime on Mars are full of wit and charm and establish Woodring as a writer full of great promise. One to watch.”
~ Elissa Schappell, author of Use Me
“Most contemporary short fiction is thin and weak like bad soup, and it leaves you starving. Then here comes Susan Woodring, with this great feast of a book! She tears the roof off of traditional domestic fiction and shows us everything that lives inside the walls of those proper houses. If there's a better book of short stories published this year, I'll eat it for breakfast and be glad of the chance to do so."
~ Pinckney Benedict, author of Town Smokes
“In these deceptively commonplace stories of husbands and wives, parents and children, neighbors and friends, Susan Woodring strips away the veneer of normalcy to show the startling mysteriousness of everyday American life. Springtime on Mars is hard to put down and even harder to forget.”
~ Luke Whisnant, author of Down in the Flood
“Amid a miasma of competent new short fictions either about the usual things or so rigorous in their objective to be nonobjective art that they are about that, Woodring crafts stories resolute enough to depose neat connotative meaning with a heuristic indeterminacy inherent in her love and respect for characters in transition from one uncertainty to the next. Often, from smack in the middle of the settled lives of families, they enter through one kind of knowledge or another into revealed vulnerability. It’s enough for them only to find their ways around the lack of discernable meaning in the events of their lives, and in that accomplishment we might find a particularly contemporary sense of their heroism and our own.
These stories refresh us with what is important about the art of fiction writing. They are inspirational in the sense that they give readers reason to keep reading and writers reason to keep writing.”
~ William Ryan, author and editor of turnrow
“Inside every character, even the most ordinary—boring, even—there exists the exquisite, the invaluable, the suffocation of normalcy, the brilliant and the ugly—the something that longs to be expressed.” ~ Susan Woodring
