Pump Up Your Book is pleased to bring you Ron Parsons’ The Sense of Touch virtual book tour May 5 – July 31!
Title: The Sense of Touch
Author: Ron Parsons
Publisher: Aqueous Books
Pages: 252
Genre: Short Story/Literary Fiction
Format: Paperback; Kindle
Old friends uncomfortably reunited and lovers who cling to their
distance from one another; disappearing fathers, fiercely loving
grandfathers, and strangers who pass through and radically change
lives…These are among the characters who populate the rugged Midwestern
landscapes of the mesmerizing fiction world of Ron Parsons. In his debut
collection, THE SENSE OF TOUCH (Aqueous Books; May 1, 2013), Parsons
captures people of various ages in the act of searching for meaning and
connection and themselves. Firmly set in South Dakota, Minnesota, and
Michigan, the lush but often brutally cold heartland of America, the
eight stories explore universal themes–loneliness, betrayal,
transformation, hope–in fresh, sometimes fanciful, sometimes comical,
sometimes jarring, and always moving and memorable ways.
In THE SENSE OF TOUCH, readers will meet:
* Naseem Sayem, the brilliant, troubled, and mystifying young man at
the center of “Hezekiah Number Three.” A native of Bangladesh abruptly
transplanted to the stark white suburbs of Rapid City at age nine,
Naseem never fit in and eventually moved on to study physics at
MIT–where, shortly before graduation and after shocking news of his
father’s infidelity and abandonment, he apparently unraveled and
vanished. Three months later, he reappeared out of the blue on his
stepmom’s doorstep, holding a three-legged cat. Naseem’s long search for
belonging reaches its apex in a hot air balloon floating over the Crazy
Horse Monument.
* Waylon Baker, wheat farmer from birth, and Evie Lund, his wife of
twenty-four years and counting, even though she had chosen to live far
away–in the alien world of the Twin Cities–for eight years. The odd
couple at the heart of “Beginning with Minneapolis,” Waylon and Evie
can’t bear to live together or to divorce because they still love each
other with a passion, reignited when they find themselves deep in the
dirt, in a hole Waylon dug in his wheat field to serve as Evie’s grave.
* The nameless narrator of “The Sense of Touch,” a serious, young
freshman at the University of Minnesota, fleeing yet still attached to
his youth in Texas, haunted both by its predatory demons and its
romantic dreams. His liberation comes through an alluring muse: his
fiction-writing teacher. A ravishing, wild-haired, Memphis-born
African-American graduate student, Vonda speaks directly to him when she
makes her dramatic pronouncements. Like, “Our masks are not worn,
people. They’re grown, day by day.” And “Never trust anything, not until
you can touch it. With touch, you know you know.”
The old friends in “The Black Hills,” long separated by distance and
tragedy, who unexpectedly compete for the affections of a lovely,
vulnerable, and married Lakota woman…the young woman who, in the midst
of a Halloween blizzard, stumbles into saving an elderly piano teacher’s
life and faces hard facts about her own snow-bound relationships and
emotions in “As Her Heart Is Navigated”…the exceptional grandfather in
“Big Blue” and the playboy reformed by someone else’s grandson in
“Moonlight Bowling”…and the professor of dead languages facing the
mysteries of mortality in “Be Not Afraid of the Universe”… Through Ron
Parsons, they all come to life, vividly and with emotional resonance,
and work their way into the minds and hearts of readers.
Book Excerpt:
They were relaxing at the top of a waterfall, in a small, still pool
where the mountain waters hit an upward slope of folded granite. It was
sort of a rounded bathtub, carved out of the rock throughout the
centuries by the rushing river, a river so hidden that it was without a
name. Just below were the falls, about a 30-foot drop into another, much
larger pool of clearest water that was gathered for a respite, a
compromise in the river’s relentless schedule downward, between
split-level decks of flat rock. Further on, the river reanimated and
released into a sharp ravine, pulling westward, down through the rugged
mountains and faceless forest–the Black Hills National Forest–gaining
force until it joined with the rush of the Castle River, near the old
Custer Trail, and was swallowed into the Deerfield Reservoir to collect
and prepare for the touch of man.
Discuss this book in our PUYB Virtual Book Club at Goodreads by clicking HERE
RON
PARSONS is a writer living in Sioux Falls. Born in Michigan and raised
in South Dakota, he was inspired to begin writing fiction in Minneapolis
while attending the University of Minnesota. His short stories have
appeared in many literary magazines and venues, including The Gettysburg
Review, Indiana Review, Storyville App, The Briar Cliff Review, Flyway,
and The Onion. His debut collection of stories, THE SENSE OF TOUCH, was
released by Aqueous Books in 2013
.
You can visit his website at
http://ronparsonswriter.com/ or
http://www.aqueousbooks.com/author_pages/24_parsons.htm.
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