Southern Methodist University Press


Sanford's stories feature small-town insurrectionists
Crossing Shattuck Bridge
Stories by Annette Sanford

Like her first collection (Lasting Attachments, SMU 1989), Annette Sanford's new gathering of stories demonstrates her vision of the unpredictability of life and the inevitability of loss. Much of the import in these ten stories is evoked and implied, in tightly written sentences in which every word is freighted with meaning. Here again is Sanford's trademark use of a precisely choreographed segue from dialogue to action—switching without transition and without confusion from one time and scene to another—in fiction leavened always with her wry and gentle humor.

In the title story, two longtime friends returning from a funeral must find a way to cross a fog-shrouded bridge; their mutual terror loosens their tongues and they confess to each other a guilty secret they've hidden for years.

In "Housekeeping," when a storm tears a hole in Miss Eloise Bannister's rent house, the itinerant carpenter who volunteers to repair it is so capable and charming he manages to remodel Miss Bannister's life.

"Sanford can layer time like a deck of cards and deal through the decades without losing her readers. I love the way her children see into adulthood as though they're peeking through venetian blinds, her adults trace back into the past and generally retrieve something useful. Sanford's characters treasure and tolerate and forgive each other's thorny human ways."—Lisa Sandlin

"It was a rare pleasure to read Annette Sanford's collection. What I am taken with most, in addition to her pitch-perfect language, is the author's integrity of purpose and effect. I wouldn't change a word, wouldn't change a thing about the arc of any of the stories."—Janet Peery

"What I love most about Annette Sanford's short stories is how they show what she values in human beings: those pockets of unsuspected insurrection. In every single story of hers, a character stands up and socks me between the eyes."—Shannon Ravenel, editor of the New Stories from the South anthologies

A native Texan, ANNETTE SANFORD taught high school English for many years before becoming a full-time writer in the mid-1970s. Her stories have been featured on National Public Radio and have been read at Symphony Space in New York City, and as part of the Texas Bound Literary Series in Dallas. Her stories have been published in McCall's, Redbook, North American Review, Ohio Review, and Southwest Review; they've been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, New Stories from the South, and New Fiction from New England.

The recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, she currently pursues her own writing projects and reviews books for the Dallas Morning News from her writing studio behind her house in Ganado, Texas.

Crossing Shattuck Bridge
ISBN 0-87074-442-9
$17.95

5 1/4x7 1/4. 216 pp.
Fiction.

Publication Date: April 1999.


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