Last Words of the Holy Ghost

Funny, heartbreaking, and realthese twelve stories showcase a dynamic range of voices belonging to characters who cant stop confessing. They are obsessive storytellers, disturbed professors, depressed auctioneers, gambling clergy. A fourteen-year-old boy gets baptized and speaks in tongues to win the love of a girl who ushers him into adulthood; a troubled insomniac searches the woods behind his mothers house for the awful pretty singing that begins each midnight; a school-system employee plans a year-end party at the site of a childs drowning; a burned-out health-care administrator retires from New England to coastal Georgia and stumbles upon a life-changing moment inside Walmart. These big-hearted peopletethered to the places that shape themsurvive their daily sorrows and absurdities with well-timed laughter; they slouch toward forgiveness, and they point their ears toward the Holy Ghosts last words.