"Spooky Action at a Distance and Other Stories" Released
Tom Noyes, assistant professor of creative writing in the B.F.A. program at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College, will sign copies of his new book, Spooky Action at a Distance and Other Stories (Dufour Editions, 2008) at The Erie Book Store this weekend.
Noyes’ signing will be held this Saturday, March 29, from 2:00 to 4:00 p.m. at the book shop, located at 137 E. 13th St. in downtown Erie.
Spooky Action’s manuscript was runner- up for the Association of Writers and Writing Programs’ 2006 Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction. Novelist Nancy Reisman, the Grace Paley Prize judge, wrote of the collection: “The smart, sharply-written Spooky Action at a Distance conjures absurdity and pathos in undeniably American landscapes: a road trip from Alabama to Terre Haute, an apartment complex in Albany, New York, a Red Lobster near the Buffalo airport. The characters who stumble through this spooky America are at once bewildered by adult failings—a marital crisis, a death in the family, a new father’s mental instability—and alert to the striking oddness within the ordinary. Spooky Action at a Distance offers a large and irresistible vision, its great empathy shot through with comic insight, its voices keen and energetic, the stories wonderfully surprising.”
The collection’s title comes from Einstein, who used the phrase “spooky action at a distance” to describe the mind-bending notions of entanglement and non-locality in quantum physics. The phrase has since been appropriated to characterize the almost paranormal connection that seemingly exists between some identical twins. The title story explores this subject to some degree, but most of the stories in the collection take on more familiar, but no less spooky, phenomena such as marriage, family, religion, politics and media.
Noyes’ first book, Behold Faith and Other Stories (Dufour Editions, 2003) was short-listed for Stanford University Library’s William Saroyan International Prize for Writing and reviewed favorably in many publications, including the New York Times Book Review, where it was praised for its macabre wit and startling confessions of frailty and delusion.
Noyes earned his M.F.A. in creative writing at Wichita State University and a Ph.D. at Ohio University, Athens. His stories have appeared in numerous journals, including American Literary Review, Image, Pleiades, and Third Coast, and have won the John Gilgun Award for Prose and the Whetstone Prize for Fiction. In addition, his work has been a finalist in prestigious competitions, including the Flannery O'Connor Award, the Bakeless Award and the Sandstone Prize for Short Fiction.
Before joining the faculty of Penn State Behrend’s School of Humanities and Social Sciences in 2004, Noyes taught in the creative writing programs at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota, and Indiana State University in Bloomington, and worked as an editor on the national literary journals Ascent and Quarter After Eight.
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