title: The Current That Carries: Stories (Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction Ser.)
author: Lisa Graley
description: A subtle, powerful portrait of the strength and limits of human connectedness. (<i>Kirkus Reviews</i>)<br /><br /><i>The Current That Carries </i>is profoundly in touch with the ways the world can reveal transcendent grace through the simplest things, the humblest things, even in the quotidian clutter of modern life and culture. These are ravishingly beautiful stories. Lisa Graley is truly an important new writer. Flannery OConnor would have loved her sensibility, would have loved this book. (Robert Olen Butler <i>author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain</i>)<br /><br />In this powerful and engaging debut collection <i>The Current That Carries</i>, Lisa Graley writes knowingly and powerfully about the nature of family in the rural world of small towns, as people struggle to take hard care of each other . . . and their animals. The stubborn hope living here is strongly reminiscent of the stories of Annie Proulx: All these lives ator nearthe end of the road reluctantly offering up their secrets. (Ron Carlson <i>author of Return to Oakpine</i>)<br /><br />From a grandmother who writes a letter to Ron Howard imploring him to direct a movie about a community tragedy, to a son who discovers a tractor mysteriously buried in his recently deceased fathers grave, to a beloved goat that appears as a ghost to a man living out his last days, you will be surprised and enthralled by the terrain covered in <i>The Current That Carries. </i>Lisa<i> </i>Graley writes with compassion, empathy, and a deep understanding of characters struggling with identities and responsibilities, or simply with staying alive. These powerful and honest stories not only examine the fragility of the human body but, more importantly, the resilience of the human heart. (Karin Lin-Greenberg <i>author of Faulty Predictions</i>)
zlib_text: About the Author
  
  
  Rose Tremain is a writer of novels, short stories and screenplays. She lives
  in Norfolk and London with the biographer Richard Holmes. Her books have been
  translated into numerous languages, and have won many prizes including the
  Orange Prize, the Whitbread Novel of the Year, the James Tait Black Memorial
  Prize, the _Prix Femina Etranger_ , the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Angel Literary
  Award and the _Sunday Express_ Book of the Year.
  
  
  _Restoration_ was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and made into a movie; _The
  Colour_ was shortlisted for the Orange Prize and selected by the _Daily Mail_
  Reading Club. Rose Tremain’s most recent collection, _The Darkness of Wallis
  Simpson,_ was shortlisted for both the First National Short Story Award and
  the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Three of her novels are
  currently in development as films.
  
  
  
  
  
  ## ALSO BY ROSE TREMAIN
  
  
  
  
  
  Novels
  
  
  _Sadler’s Birthday_
  
  
  _Letter to Sister Benedicta_
  
  
  _The Cupboard_
  
  
  _The Swimm