SCOTT NADELSON

Nadelson stories called sophisticated, exhilarating

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article created on: 2011-10-15T00:00:00

Oregon Book award winner Scott Nadelson has published a new collection of short stories, his third.

In “Aftermath: Stories,” just out from Hawthorne Books, the one-time Jewish Review staff editor explores the variety of human response in the aftermath of momentous events—the rupture of relationships, the loss of loved ones, the dissolution of dreams, and yet they find new ways of getting on with their lives.

In “Oslo,” a 13-year-old boy on a trip to Israel with his grandparents grapples with his father’s abandonment and his own rocky coming-of-age. In the title story, a couple testing out the waters of trial separation quickly discover how deeply the fault lines of their marriage run and how desperately they want to hang onto what remains.

Nadelson’s first collection of short stories, “The Cantor’s Daughter,” won the Samuel and Sons Fiction Prize for Emerging Jewish Writers and the Reform Judaism Fiction Prize.

His second collection, “Saving Stanley: The Brickman Stories,” won the Oregon Book Award for Short Fiction and the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award. He teaches creative writing at Willamette University and lives in Salem.

Author Margo Livesey (“The House on Fortune Street”) called Nadelson’s latest book “a sophisticated, emotionally complicated collection with an exhilarating undercurrent of danger.”

Nadelson will read from his new collection Nov. 14 at 7:30 p.m. at Powell’s Books at 3747 SE Hawthorne Blvd. and again on Nov. 18 at 7 p.m. at the Oregon State University Library in Corvallis.