A Dream of Old Leaves - by Bret Lott (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Bret Lott's powerful, insightful stories illuminate the everyday episodes that move us -- husbands and wives, parents and children, friends and neighhors -- along the intricate paths of intimacy. A little boy's first bad dream brings his father back to his own childhood nights when danger lurked beneath the bed; in the California desert at night two brothers in a pickup tune into radio stations from distant places, interrupted by sudden bursts of static; estranged suburban friends become good neighbors again in the course of thwarting two thieves.
Lott's previous novels, The Man Who Owned Vermont and A Stranger's House, established him as "one of the strongest voices to come along in some time" (The San Francisco Chronicle). A Dream of Old Leaves stakes out his place in the landscape of new American fiction.

Review Quotes

Richmond News Leader Lott is almost a miniaturist in his ability to evoke powerful emotions from stories that are, at times, merely slivers of human experience....It takes a consummate artist to bring off the kind of effect Lott seems so effortlessly to achieve.

San Francisco Chronicle A Dream of Old Leaves is a haunting, memorable collection...immediately sympathetic, highly resonant, and sometimes quite funny....Lott makes the mundane sing....He forces a reader, through the accumulation of detail, to feel along with his characters, to perceive one's own truth....

The Boston Globe Bret Lott writes about the ordinariness of life with...delicacy and subtlety...these stories are...haunting in their simplicity and sensitivity.

The Chicago Tribune Scrupulously crafted stories....Their prose is stripped of adornment but not of music, and is capable of generating a good deal of strong emotion!

The New York Times Book Review Probing beneath the smooth surface of suburban domesticity, Mr. Lott's spare, emotionally restrained fictions bring to mind a minimalist John Cheever....The best of these domestic tales are very good indeed.

The San Francisco Chronicle A haunting, memorable collection....impressive.

Washington Times These are subtle, tightly told tales, often marked by humor and compellingly odd characters...carefully constructed and satisfying.

James Atlas Bret Lott writes about men and women, work and marriage, with a clear-eyed sense of the ways in which we betray -- and redeem -- ourselves.

Pat Conroy Bret Lott is an important artist.

About the Author

Bret Lott is the author of five highly acclaimed novels, The Man Who Owned Vermont, A Stranger's House, Jewel, Reed's Beach, and The Hunt Club, as well as two collections of widely anthologized short stories, A Dream of Old Leaves and How to Get Home, and a memoir, Fathers, Sons, and Brothers. He lives with his wife and two sons near Charleston, South Carolina, and teaches at the College of Charleston and Vermont College.