Rituals to Observe - (Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction) by Ethan Laughman (Paperback)

About the Book

Compiled from the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction series, these stories always amount to something more than a celebration of the holidays dotting our calendars from month to month. Even though holidays can occasion a return to the familiar, these stories diversify how we observe holidays and challenge traditional associations with holidays such as Christmas. However, the underlying rituals - which make us pause, feel, love, and act - remain in place. No author in this anthology means for a holiday to be the main focus, yet the holiday makes the story work. Many of the stories display family tensions that add a wild-card element to holidays. Characters also may feel forced to buy into a holiday's assigned emotion - fear on Halloween, gratitude on Thanksgiving - whereas experience leads in another direction. Maybe it's a holiday's time of year, or maybe it's the baggage the holiday arrives with (or that we hand to it). For whatever reasons, each holiday has its own atmosphere. Each story serves to complicate the human observation of holidays and offers a nuanced understanding of related themes such as family and motherhood, travel, grief and mourning processes, and memory. More generally, holidays are days of observance, and that aspect alone offers a lot to unpack.

Book Synopsis

These stories amount to something more than a celebration of the holidays dotting our calendars from month to month. Even though holidays can occasion a return to the familiar, these stories challenge traditional associations. Each story serves to complicate how we observe the human observation of holidays and offers a nuanced understanding of related themes such as family and motherhood, travel, grief and mourning processes, and memory. More generally, holidays are days of observance, and that aspect alone offers a lot to unpack.

About the Author

ETHAN LAUGHMAN is among the few who have read every Flannery O'Connor Award-winning volume. He collaborated closely with the series' authors in compiling these new anthologies. He currently teaches high school English.