From the Dust Bowl to The Magic Kingdom, the Rust Belt to the casinos of Atlantic City, Exposure captures the slow- burn dramas of regret and desire that smolder across America. A grieving photographer blurs time with long exposures and darkroom fumes, inhaled hard. An abused young man searches the woods for abandoned children raised by wolves. A recovering addict takes his grown daughters on a Disney vacation, two decades too late. Collecting layered long stories and lyrical flash fictions, Exposure presents a poignant and formally surprising look at longing, family bonds, and the ever- human effort to reconcile our pasts with our hopes for the future. Evocative and wryly funny, Exposure marks the debut of a gifted and sensitive writer.
Praise for Exposure
Resch George’s writing aptly understands and demonstrates the basic premise of all great storytelling: the crucial connection between character and action that gives meaning to both. Readers of these stories will become absorbed in the pages because they will be immediately drawn into caring for the memorable characters that come alive within, and the circumstances and actions that affect their lives. The stories in Exposure simmer without succumbing to sensationalistic plots or preposterous predicaments—and the writing is so effective that you never really appreciate it… until the last sentence is read.—Thom Didato
The stories in Exposure sear like light trails, glimmering and striking their lyrical, luminous pitch. Resch George’s characters are searchers, feeling through the darkness of their suburban lives to the edges that shape a deeper truth by which to reckon their experiences and their desires—always conscious of the pulse beneath the surface. They are on the cusp, their lives on the verge of breaking or blooming or both. With the sensibility of a poet, Resch George has built stories that spark and sing.—Allison Titus
This is a stirring, exquisite, heartbreaking yet hopeful book. Resch George’s pitch-perfect stories brim over with life—longing, love, sorrow, and the great question of which parts of ourselves we should illuminate and narrate. Whether describing joy or pain, the writing feels both effortless and exquisite, the work of a true master of the form. The book deserves a place on your shelf of favorites, where you’ll reach for it again and again.—Susann Cokal
Excerpt from Exposure
When I arrive at my classroom, I hear laughter. I pause at the shut door and look in through the window. Garrett is at the front of the room, projecting images from his laptop onto the whiteboard that I cannot see from this angle. He’s doing some kind of demo in a program I surely don’t know, and the kids look absolutely rapt. Marilyn Jenkins and Headmaster Tyberczy sit in the back of the room, smiling and jotting notes in their legal pads. I wrap my hand around the doorknob, then release it. I don’t know what I intend to do if I enter that room. Here is a definitely closed door, I realize, and I think of Emily.
My hands tingle with an ache to touch her. I turn away from the door and head to the west exit, to my car in the parking lot. A momentum builds in my legs as I imagine Emily and what she might be doing right now— her head bowed over a desk in a cubicle, processing sheets of penciled-in dots and checking the clock. By the time I’m out of the building, I can’t get to my car fast enough. I walk in stagger-step bursts, and then I’m running.
