Liberation of Little Heaven and Other Stories

In a remarkably short time, Mark Jacobs has published four dozen stories in periodicals ranging from The Atlantic Monthly to Southwest Review. In 1994 he published a collection entitled A Cast of Spaniards, which received complimentary reviews, including a starred Publishers Weekly that cited its "exquisite craftsmanship". In 1996 he published the novel Stone Cowboy, on the basis of which Robert Olen ButLer predicted he would "become our own Graham Greene".In his new collection, Jacobs explores the spiritual territory he knows so well, South America. In "Two Dead Indians", a dying Paraguayan veteran of the Chaco War, visited by ghosts of his Bolivian enemies, relives one unexplainable night in the desert, sixty years past. The title story finds a grownup victim of a government-run "school for girls" in quiet confrontation with the school's old and broken, director. Jacobs's characters are inundated by their unrecorded and recorded histories, the press of their Western ambitions and the gravity of their traditional beliefs. The modernity their societies hold out like a taunting promise seems self-destructive. Yet they prevail at times brilliantly interweaving their psychic selves with the difficult beauty of their circumstances.