Descending Fire & Other Stories

John Allman

Allman shows us…factual narratives that reconnect us to our historical roots, giving us a vision of how we got to be who we are, and what we may yet become.

Richard Fewell, The Small Pond Magazine

Descending Fire & Other Stories

Fiction by John Allman

The eight short stories in John Allman’s Descending Fire comprise a loose chronicle in the lives of working-class and immigrant New Yorkers, from the 1950s to the present. The author describes his characters as people who, though they earn little money, are not quite working poor—nor can they work without working hard. They do not know quite how to betray or abandon each other. Mostly, they try to love and do not readily shy from duty. Though Allman’s narratives run from stark naturalism to the near magical and the out-and-out futuristic, his imagination holds to the everyday—as if to say to his readers: Yes, life is grim, but it is precisely the unbearable that becomes the ground for healing.

Buy Descending Fire & Other Stories

Clothbound(published Sep, 17 1994)

Price US
19.95
Page Count
168
Portrait of John Allman

John Allman

Contemporary American poet and novelist

Allman shows us…factual narratives that reconnect us to our historical roots, giving us a vision of how we got to be who we are, and what we may yet become.

Richard Fewell, The Small Pond Magazine

For Allman, geography is a means of understanding the ways of others, which he does warmly, compassionately, and with novelistic specificity.

Helen Carr, Times Literary Supplement