Suffering Fools – by Glori Simmons
by Glori Simmons. A Woman running a halfway house for paroled sexual predators is left wondering if her favorite has committed his most unthinkable crime yet. A groundskeeper, who has just discovered that his ex is pregnant, digs up an infant’s tombstone inscribed with his own name. A traumatic traffic collision sends an aging couple back into their decades-long marriage. Whether it be a dying man spying on two teenage lovers, or a new mother running from her colicky infant, the nine stories in Suffering Fools spring from the dark corners of our psyches, revealing the fears and contradictions that give shape to unconditional love.
What a gritty and brave world author Glori Simmons has created in Suffering Fools. This Pandora’s box of stories are chockablock with cheaters and deviants, colicky babies and mistaken parents, halfway houses and crime scenes, all of it beautifully balanced by a delicate understanding of love, “fluttering inside like a moth at a screendoor…” -Sharma Shields, Judge of the Spokane Prize for Short Fiction
To read Glori Simmons is to recognize ourselves at our most flawed and best intended, at our most heartbreakingly human… -Lysley Tenorio, Monstress
In Glori Simmons’ brave, fiercely imagined stories the nature of grace commingles with a gravity almost too terrible to bear. Her prose is beautiful and precise, her people unwieldy, boldly rendered, and frightened by histories that run the pass like locomotives, brakeless, carrying humanity on the downgrade as if hungry and afire. -Shann Ray, American Book Award winning author of Balefire and American Copper
In Suffering Fools, Glori Simmons peels back the superficial layers of marital and familial bonds to expose the strange and astounding lengths we go to to discover ourselves inside another… These potent, unflinching stories reveal not only the terror of true intimacy, but the thrill of struggling past this fear in our unquenchable desire to love each other. -Val Brelinski, author of The Girl Who Slept with God
Suffering Fools is a winner of the Spokane Prize in fiction. It can be purchased here.