Hazards of Nature

As the title of Brandon Dudley's excellent chapbook suggests, bad things happen to the people in his stories. A young boy is teased past bearing by his brutish father and brothers. A man faces an agonizing choice: to give up either the wife he loves or the children he has always wanted but that she refuses to have. An elderly widower finds solace in his attachment to a tree he has planted but is hopeless when it comes to connecting with his fellow human beings.

These are ordinary people, and the trouble that finds them is ordinary too. Whether or not you've ever been old and isolated, or helplessly bullied, or torn between two equally powerful desires, the range of human emotions here-fear, anger, love, sadness, loneliness, mortification, loss-is sure to be familiar. What makes the stories in Hazards of Nature so compelling for me is not just the writer's insightful portraits of his characters' struggles but his sensitivity in regard to their pain. -from the Introduction, by Sigrid Nunez