Bodies on the Line

Peter Stine, beloved founder and editor of Witness, gives us a debut collection of stories that defy categorization. Here is a great weird scope. The most realistic story can twist and turn until suddenly you’re in the land of dreams, questioning everything. Stine studies violence and self-deception, unspeakable griefs and hypocrisy, sports and war, injustice, kindness. The body in these stories is often under siege — “on the line” — either physically or psychologically. Wildly imaginative, the stories are often funny and absurd, always stripped clean of artifice, and possessed by the same eyes-wide-open-to-the-world consciousness that gave rise to one of the best literary magazines in the country.