Whispers in Dust and Bone

Whispers in Dust and Bone (Texas Tech University Press, 2003) is Andrew Geyer's debut short story cycle.  The book won the silver medal in the Short Fiction category for the Foreward Magazine Book of the Year Awards for 2003.  One of the stories in the collection, "Second Coming," won the Spur Award from the Western Writers of America for the Best Work of Short Fiction for 2003.  The book was also named a Finalist for the John Gardner Fiction Book Award.  

The book is now available for purchase at the Texas Tech University Press website, at the Barnes and Noble website, and at Amazon.com.  To purchase a copy of the book from one of these websites, please see the links below.   

Whispers in Dust and Bone is now available.  Purchase information, and general information about the collection, is listed below.

Diverse in setting and broad in range, these award-winning stories all turn, in some way, on the passing of the rural Southwest Texas way of life and its stamp on those who leave there.

Ranging from bare-bones narratives to magical realism and ever lush in regional particulars, the stories all center on a sense of place. Sharing a point of origin and a journey, their characters weave in and out of the stories, looking for new starts-for answers-and seeing the world through dry eyes. They explore exotic Machu Picchu, Lake Titicaca, and a dig site in Peru and make a voyage of discovery down the Amazon River. They lose faith in God and find it again in such unlikely places as a water lot in South Carolina.

The displaced protagonists all search for something elusive, something lost, yet in Geyer's hands are yoked by a tension that is somehow always new and always compelling.

Andrew Geyer grew up on a working ranch in Southwest Texas. His award-winning fiction has appeared in Southwestern American Literature, South Dakota Review, RE:AL, Concho River Review, Chiron Review, Yemassee, and others and was nominated for the 2002 Pushcart Prize.