A Gram of Mars: Stories (ISBN 1889330221)

Funny, heart-breaking, tales of broken people/families:
My favorite story here is "A Gram of Mars", because it shows the lingering, telling effects of divorce on the child(ren) of the family. Not everyone has parents who are larger than life and impossibly strong; in fact, if you live long enough, no one does. The title story is so sad and so full of love..."Fugue" is magical and hilarious...and "Holding the Fort" was another standout. This author's writing reminded me of Lorie Moore, Anne Tyler, and maybe Francine Prose, just to give a general idea.

Richly Textured Lives:
This book is for anyone who loves Alice Munro or Antonya Nelson or, for that matter, Edith Wharton or any other serious writer who works to create a complex and richly textured world. It's hard to believe that this is a first book. It's terrific.

A fantastic debut!:
These stories are beautifully, hauntingly written, snapshots that will stay with you long after you've finished reading them. They are brief stories of love and loss, desire and despair, that manage to engage you intimately in the space of a few pages. My favorite by far was "Fugue", the story of a father obsessed with learning to build and play the organ. I was hooked from the opening lines: "Some fathers on Saturday afternoons fix the car or spray weedkiller on the lawn. Mine would take the air apart and put it back together with a fugue." In the next paragraph, she says, "On summer evenings his organ music got stuck in the screen door and floated on top of the cat's water dish." I love it! I'll never hear music again without this image in my head. Hagenston has managed to make the organ music itself a physical presence in this story, almost another character. "Fugue" is also the most hopeful of the stories, most of which focus on characters in crisis - a woman whose husband has just left her, a preacher's wife unsure of her new position, a divorced father adrift in the world with only a gram of meteorite to show for his life. "A Gram of Mars" is a wonderfully written collection of short stories. I look forward to reading more from this author.