Traveling from America to Asia and back again, the stories in this extraordinarily diverse collection chart the emotional journeys of characters in search of compassion and love, sometimes a second chance. They speak with a special eloquence to anyone who has ever felt like a stranger in an alien land.
Whether set in Bangkok or China during the Cultural Revolution, in the Philippines or India, these stories carry a profound impact. Each tale details a journey of discovery, from the travels of an American searching for his brother at an ashram in India, to a woman who drives er husband's cherished Jaguar into a lake.
For the characters in Samuel Atlee's fiction, the world is often a baffling place, and change means having the courage to make the passage into the person they must become. Highly charges and exotic, these stories are infused with suprising grace.
Review: "Atlee's talent is undeniable..."
-The Easton Express Times
"The 13 entries are highly literary works, but entirely accessible, with consistently cogent observations of human nature. Atlee is a precision wordsmith and often his prose reads like poetry."
-The Lancaster New Era
"These are lovely, intelligent stories about reasonable people striving to stay upright in the tides of an unreasonable world. Atlee has unusual perception about the thinking and behavior of our time, even when he writes about foreigners in exotic places. Best of all, he knows a central irony about human behavior - how social restraint is always struggling with the beast inside us."
-John Leggett, author of Ross and Tom, and former director, University of Iowa Writer's Workshop
"[The] protagonists in Men at Risk accept the irrational hazardous circumstances they suddenly find themselves in, as if each of them had always suspected that just such an occassion was in store for them. Catapulted into the conflict with all its tactile realism, the reader is absorbed by these characters' ironic, bemused responses to encounters for which they are ill-prepared - and from which there is no escape. These stories quicken our awareness of how the unexpected always arrives with its own claims and consequences."
-Dennis Must, author of Banjo Grease: Selected Stories
Bio: SAMUEL ATLEE attended Duke University and the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop, where he was a Teaching-Writing Fellow. He was a Peace Corps volunteer in Tunisia and worked in Hong Kong for The Wall Street Journal. His stories have been widely published in literary magazines, and he has received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
