Keeping Track: Fiction of Lists

From ex-lovers to holiday ornaments, from resolutions to stay sober to fantasies about home-cooked meals, the stories in this anthology chronicle losses and upheavals through that most basic of forms-the list. In despair or frustration, with determination or sorrow, the characters in these eighteen stories frame their lives with lists to make sense of the turmoil, to learn what is most important to them--and why. A young biologist bands songbirds in Alaska and discovers a new destiny. A grieving son attempts to save what remains of his father's legacy from a flood. A social worker at a halfway house tries to make it through the day. Teenage girls burn the symbols of rejected lives. An immigrant suffers the loss of a child and her husband's cruelty far from her native Africa. These stories--and many others--list the things we lose and the things we keep.--Yelizaveta P. Renfro