The Heroes & Other Stories

General Fiction

By Kat Hausler

Publisher : All Things That Matter Press

ABOUT Kat Hausler

Kat Hausler
I like cities and books and small dogs and large mountains and awkward situations only in retrospect.

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Description

Set against the colorful, yet sometimes strangely cold, backdrop of Manhattan, the stories in this collection are peopled with a very particular breed of heroes, not quite what they're fighting for. Here you will find characters in progress, people still getting to who they are: a self-conscious student who feels incomplete without a partner, a talented artist blind to the beauty of his own work, a couple who can't bring their love of an idealized past into the present, and an unstable woman whose breakdown causes those around her to realize their own frailty. These everyday heroes all have their own flaws and failings, all fall short time and time again, but struggle on, after worthy but elusive ideals: a sense of self, and a connection to the world around them.

This is a collection of short fiction I began writing while living in New York, but edited and had published after moving to Berlin, where I could look at the experience of life in Manhattan at a distance. The stories are about figuring things out, the right questions as much as their answers, and a lot of cliches about finding yourself that aren't cliches when you're living them.

I loved The Heroes and Other Stories. Kat Hausler does an incredible job of making each character seem real and significant. Her stories are almost haunting and leave you thinking about what occurred long after reading the last word. My favorite one was the title story, The Heroes, with Peripeteia at a very close second. I could read these stories again and again!

(customer review)