In Three Little Love Stories, accomplished storyteller Pam Durban introduces us to a trio of women who have known love, hurt, and the oftentimes narrow distance between the two. "Riddle Me This" finds a woman freed from a dangerous marriage still able to recall with wonder and fondness her first encounter with her ex. In "All Hallows Eve" readers meet a couple stripped of costumes to reveal their vulnerable pasts in a moment of sheltering embrace. "Little Bone" asks if a patient, trusting love can stand as a cure for all of the haunting dangers of isolation. In each tale, Durban demonstrates her masterful command of evocative language and short form fiction as she delves into the complexities of the human experience of love.
The Three Little Love Stories—"Riddle Me This," "All Hallows Eve," and "Little Bone,"—were previously published in Shenandoah and are an excerpt from Soon: Stories, Pam Durban's new collection from Story River Books exploring the myriad ways people lose, find, and hold on to one another.
Pam Durban is the author of the novels The Laughing Place (winner of the Townsend Prize), So Far Back (winner of the Lillian Smith Award), and The Tree of Forgetfulness and the short story collection All Set About with Fever Trees. Her short fiction has been published in Georgia Review, Tri-Quarterly, Southern Review, Shenandoah, Crazyhorse, Epoch, New Virginia Review, Ohio Review, and elsewhere. Durban has received a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship and a Whiting Writer's Award as well as a James Michener Creative Writing Fellowship from the University of Iowa. With former Georgia poet laureate David Bottoms, she is founding coeditor of Five Points literary magazine. A native of Aiken, South Carolina, she is the Doris Betts Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
