Flight

Named Arizona’s professor of the year by the Carnegie Foundation, a faculty member in Arizona State University’s creative writing program for more than twenty-five years, Jay Boyer is primarily known as a playwright and a teacher. His plays have been produced in Europe and Canada, as well as throughout America, many of them off-off-Broadway, and they have won honors both here and abroad. But he is equally adept as a fiction writer. During this same quarter century his stories have been honored internationally and published in some of the literary world’s most prestigious journals. Flight and Other Stories brings ten of these together, often drawing us into landscapes so foreign that they defy what we know of our daily reality. We’re with the fattest woman on earth as she draws her last breaths and her soul ascends toward its final reward. We meet a divorcee who can fly for no more effort than flapping her arms. We follow a middle-aged butler whose love affair with a young woman leads him first to the mysteries of bondage, and then to the pleasures of malice. Story by story, we set foot into worlds so strange as to seem all but surreal, yet everything feels familiar, each moment rings true. And that’s when we recognize we’re in the hands of one of America’s truly original talents.