The Current That Carries

Reviews / Votes

A subtle, powerful portrait of the strength and limits of human connectedness. * Kirkus Reviews * The Current That Carries is profoundly in touch with the ways the world can reveal transcendent grace through the simplest things, the humblest things, even in the quotidian clutter of modern life and culture. These are ravishingly beautiful stories. Lisa Graley is truly an important new writer. Flannery O'Connor would have loved her sensibility, would have loved this book. -- Robert Olen Butler * author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain * In this powerful and engaging debut collection The Current That Carries, Lisa Graley writes knowingly and powerfully about the nature of family in the rural world of small towns, as people struggle to take hard care of each other . . . and their animals. The stubborn hope living here is strongly reminiscent of the stories of Annie Proulx: All these lives at-or near-the end of the road reluctantly offering up their secrets. -- Ron Carlson * author of Return to Oakpine * From a grandmother who writes a letter to Ron Howard imploring him to direct a movie about a community tragedy, to a son who discovers a tractor mysteriously buried in his recently deceased father's grave, to a beloved goat that appears as a ghost to a man living out his last days, you will be surprised and enthralled by the terrain covered in The Current That Carries. LisaGraley writes with compassion, empathy, and a deep understanding of characters struggling with identities and responsibilities, or simply with staying alive. These powerful and honest stories not only examine the fragility of the human body but, more importantly, the resilience of the human heart. -- Karin Lin-Greenberg * author of Faulty Predictions *