The Law of Miracles

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Winner of the Juniper Prize for Fiction These stories take place in the space where the rational and irrational intersect—the space governed by The Law of Miracles. Writing with a remarkable range of invention, Gregory Blake Smith has created a world in which his characters navigate between the everyday and the extraordinary : an aged Russian woman who lives simultaneously in the St. Petersburg of iPods and BMWs and in the starving Leningrad of the Siege; a Venetian art conservator who loves the women of the Renaissance paintings he restores but cannot bear the touch of the woman at his side; a down-and-out slot-machine technician who calculates the probability of his wife’s dying. Yet for all their variety of setting and subject, there runs through each of these stories a thread of the miraculous, a suspicion that the transcendent lies just at the edge of perception. “As marvelously varied as these stories are in terms of premise, narration, and setting, they all exhibit the same powerful sense of authenticity, creative exuberance, careful observation, and moral engagement. The Law of Miracles is intellectual, even philosophical, but its exploration of ideas never comes at the expense of its characters, whose hearts and minds Smith occupies with empathy and elegance and a fundamental regard for complexity. Chekhov said a writer’s job is not to solve problems but to state them correctly, and that’s exactly what Smith does in this precise and deeply imagined collection. The Law of Miracles is my favorite kind of book, both conceptual and urgent.”—Chris Bachelder, author of Abbott Awaits and Bear v. Shark Gregory Blake Smith is the Lloyd P. Johnson-Norwest Professor of English and the Liberal Arts at Carleton College. He holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is the author of three novels: The Madonna of Las Vegas, The Devil in the Dooryard, and The Divine Comedy of John Venner, which was selected as a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times Book Review. Cover design by Sally Nichols Cover art: photo of an astrolabe. Courtesy Museum of the History of Science, Oxford, U.K. UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS PRESS Amherst and Boston www.umass.edu/umpress SMITH THE LAW OF MIRACLES massachusetts LawOF t he Miracles Gregory blake smith and other stories smithcover.indd 1 3/22/11 10:10:42 AM The Law of Miracles The Law of Miracles 0 0 university of massachusetts press Amherst and Boston ...