In Love & Other Stories, gifted storyteller William Cass has crafted tales that are like novels in miniature, hinting at entire lives with minimal brushstrokes. The title story pulls the reader into a meditation over youthful love, and love remains a persistent theme throughout the book: love that cannot flourish, forbidden love, unrequited love, parental love (or the lack of it), love between teachers and students or between friends of many years, and the love of nature (the final story “Yakutat” is steeped in the majestic beauty of Alaskan waterways and mountains). Cass writes about ordinary people—public school teachers, soldiers, construction or factory workers, a transcriptionist, janitor, priest, strip club bouncer—who struggle with love. Yet even in the bleakest situations, where characters are bereft and lonely, happiness is possible, sometimes arising out of dogged self-reliance (or love of self) and sometimes the compassion of strangers, which is also a kind of love.
—Jo-Anne Rosen, What They Don’t Know: Selected Fiction
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With each of these fourteen small slices of life, William Cass takes a slice of your heart. In a few pages of lean language, each story reveals his characters’ lives, conveys their past, and leaves us rooting for their future. Love & Other Stories does all this with writing that grips you but never intrudes or distracts. Cass continues to prove he’s among our very best short story authors.
—McKie Campbell, Clean Slate and North Coast
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No one conveys the beauty, the power of landscapes as deftly as William Cass, but in Love & Other Stories, he also navigates the complexities of the human heart with artfully-assembled narrative maps. He explores the vulnerabilities and frustrations involved in family dynamics, the impact of illnesses, addictions, loneliness, aging, and all with empathy rather than judgment. His characters are living amidst an array of circumstances, but they share universal longings, sorrows, needs and joys. His prose conveys a calming stillness, one that allows his characters and his readers to listen, to observe as ordinary moments become extraordinary. He knows the magnitude of what is often not said, but felt. Quiet moments shimmer and resonate. Life may move forward only in inches, in single stitches, but the resulting changes are profound if we’re paying attention. Cass is an author who manages to always find the right note.
—Kerry Langan Live Your Life & Other Stories; My Name Is Your Name & Other Stories
