The Woods explores the lives of people in a small Vermont college town and its surrounding areas鈥攁 place at the edge of the bucolic, where the land begins to shift into something untamed. In the tradition of Elizabeth Strout鈥檚 Olive Kitteridge and Sherwood Anderson鈥檚 Winesburg, Ohio, these stories follow people who carry private griefs but search for contentment. As they try to make sense of their worlds, grappling with problems鈥攚orried about their careers, their marriages, their children, their ambitions鈥攖hey also sift through the happiness they have, and often find deep solace in the landscape.
What do we find in the woods? An uplifting of spirit or a quieting of sorrow. A sense of being haunted by the past. Sometimes rougher, more violent things: abandoned quarries and feral cats, black bears, brothers caught up in an escalating war, a ghost who wishes to pass on her despair, monsters who boom with hollow ecstatic laughter. But also songbirds: the hermit thrush and the winter wren. Rushing rivers glossy with froth. A nineteenth-century inn that鈥檚 somehow gotten by all these years. And far within, a vegetal twilight and constant dusk that feels outside of time. This remarkable debut illuminates the ways we all carry within ourselves aspects stark, beautiful, wild, and unknowable.
鈥淚n Janice Obuchowski鈥檚 stories, the woods surrounding a Vermont college town are as suffused with mystery and dread as any forest found in the Brothers Grimm. The characters adrift in these woods are viscerally alive and heartbreakingly real as they search for a route back to the world they knew. By situating the universal experience of bewilderment within one specifically observed woods, Obuchowski has crafted a genuine work of art.鈥濃擜nthony Marra, judge, John Simmons Short Fiction Award
鈥淭hese are such richly inhabited storyworlds, tottering between the wild and the civilized, peeking into places made stunningly lucid with language but still mysterious in the way the natural world is mysterious. What a thrilling debut!鈥濃擜imee Bender, author, The Butterfly Lampshade
&苍产蝉辫;鈥The Woods is a smart, moving collection鈥攄escriptive, evocative鈥攚ith rich and believable worlds for readers to immerse themselves in.鈥濃擬egan Mayhew Bergman, author, How Strange a Season
鈥淚 was happy to be lost in the shadows, clearings, and tangled vines of these stories鈥攅ach is generous, funny, and beautifully precise, and together they make something gorgeous. I am Janice Obuchowski鈥檚 great big fan.鈥濃擱amona Ausubel, author, Awayland
鈥淛anice Obuchowski鈥檚 stories place us in a very particular world, the world of college town Vermont, where intellect rules but The Woods summon, her narrators like woodland sirens. We meet people at both ends of life鈥攜oung academics and those looking back from retirement鈥攁s well as locals making sense of their changing communities, all of them lured to the liminal space of the woods. In beautiful, compelling, precise prose, Obuchowski observes the human ability to go on in the face of the unknown, the regretted, the unexpected, and, perhaps most important, the unchangeable. As with all the best fables, one thinks: don鈥檛 go into the woods. But of course you must.鈥濃擫ori Ostlund, author, After the Parade
鈥淛anice Obuchowski鈥檚 voice鈥攄eliberate, lucid, arrestingly authoritative鈥攊s a pleasure; with a careful eye and generous measured style she renders a Vermont landscape and its inhabitants. With its cast of recurring characters, and exquisite attention to place, this collection calls to mind Sherwood Anderson鈥檚 Winesburg, Ohio and Elizabeth Strout鈥檚 Olive Kitteridge.鈥濃擜manda Coplin, author, The Orchardist
"Obuchowski鈥檚 lucid debut collection digs into the isolation and complexities of her characters鈥 inner worlds... evocative interior descriptions and subtle revelations about the characters鈥 relationships to place.鈥濃Publishers Weekly
鈥淲hen you look closely enough at a place, you might begin noticing things that don鈥檛 quite mesh with your understanding of the world. Think most folk horror; think . Janice Obuchowski鈥檚 new collection The Woods heads into a suburban Gothic space, with some of its stories populated by ghosts and strange creatures.鈥濃Tor.com
鈥淓ach story in The Woods, carefully paced and keenly observed, takes a close and compassionate look at the supposedly bucolic lifestyles of those living in a quaint town and unearths the emotional fault lines that undergird ordinary life. . . . With hints of dark fairy tales and grim truths that are unable to be faced, these stories marry unsettled imaginings to those that are heart-wrenchingly real.鈥濃擲helf Awareness
鈥淓loquent, erudite, inherently engaging, thought-provoking and fun, The Woods is an impressive collection of eleven original short stories by a master of this difficult literary format.鈥濃Midwest Book Review
