A wider life breathed in him, and things’ rims stirred and reared back.” Dillard’s is a poetics, even a metaphysics, of relationality and juxtaposition. In one typical scene, a character “stood on the foredune’s lip and looked at the stars over the ocean. In it, characters’ lives “play… out before the backdrop of fixed stars” their human-sized concerns-about love, poetry, the inevitable late-summer fade of the Boston Red Sox-are set against the time-scale of planets and galaxies. “Cosmic realism” is a perfect description of Dillard’s slim novel. If there were such a thing as cosmic realism, The Maytrees would be a classic of the genre. Its sea is wild and generative, its sky orders the constellations, and both are primordial, archaic, full of the fact of time past and persisting, unchanging, changing everything. And time in its mystery and grandeur bestrides this novel. She lives in Doylestown, Pennsylvania.In a 2007 review of Annie Dillard’s novel The Maytrees, Marilynne Robinson marveled at the temporal expansiveness of Dillard’s imaginative vision:ĭillard has always been fascinated by time-by the fact that existence is charged with it, saturated with it, borne along by it into a future that makes the span of any life less than negligible. Kathryn has been a leader in the southeastern Pennsylvania writing scene for more than a decade and is also the author ofThe Art of Falling. The Far End of Happy was born from Craft’s need to make sense of what her husband had done. In 1997, after fifteen years of marriage, her husband committed suicide in a police standoff, leaving her and their two young sons.

Craft wrote exclusively nonfiction until she was plunged in the kind of real-life drama that demands attention. “Framing the novel within a 12-hour period keeps the pages turning (Library Journal).” Narrating from the alternating perspectives of three women, whose lives will be forever altered by Jeff Farnham, gives an intimate look at the steps a woman will take to get the help her husband so urgently needs while desperately trying to keep her children safe.Ī former dance critic who wrote for The Morning Call daily newspaper in Allentown, Pennsylvania, for nineteen years. When the emotionally troubled Jeff engages police in a deadly stand-off, his wife, mother-in-law, and mother struggle to understand why the man they love has turned his back on the life they have given him, the one they all believe is still worth living. Here Craft delivers “real, raw emotion” (Library Journal) exploring a marriage unraveled by mental illness and one man’s spiral towards a violent conclusion that tests the courage, love, and hope of the three women he leaves behind. The Far End of Happy is a powerful new novel based on author Kathryn Craft’s personal experience with a stand-off involving her husband.

The art of falling kathryn craft