About this item
The intricate, interlocking stories of Jensen Beach's extraordinarily poised story collection are set in a Swedish village on the Baltic Sea as well as in Stockholm over the course of two eventful years.In Swallowed by the Cold, people are besieged and haunted by disasters both personal and national: a fatal cycling accident, a drowned mother, a fire on a ferry, a mysterious arson, the assassination of the Swedish foreign minister, and, decades earlier, the Soviet bombing of Stockholm. In these stories, a drunken, lonely woman is convinced that her new neighbor is the daughter of her dead lover; a one-armed tennis player and a motherless girl reckon with death amid a rainstorm; and happening upon a car crash, a young woman is unaccountably drawn to the victim, even as he slides into a coma and her marriage falls into jeopardy.
About the Author
JENSEN BEACH received his MFA from the Program for and Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts, as well as degrees from Stockholm University. He is the author of a collection of short stories called For out of the Heart Proceed (Dark Sky Books) , and his stories and reviews have appeared in American Short Fiction, Best of the Web 2010, Fifty-Two Stories, Kenyon Review Online, The Lifted Brow, Ninth Letter, Sou'wester, and Witness, among other publications. He has received scholarships from the Napa Valley and Sewanee Writers' Conferences. Currently, teaches at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he lives with his family. He can be reached at jensenwbeach.com.
