If I Had Two Wings

"Ten heavenly stories that chronicle ineffable events in ordinary lives. When Randall Kenan's first collection was published, The New York Times called it "nothing short of a wonder-book." With comparable inventiveness but seasoned by maturity and shot through with humor, his second collection, If I Had Two Wings, riffs on the human relationship with the transcendent. Rooted in Kenan's fictional territory of Tims Creek, NC, this book also travels to more "sophisticated" places, as these ten stories chronicle ineffable events in ordinary lives: a retired North Carolinian on a church trip to Manhattan, taking in life with gentle curiosity, who is befriended by Billy Idol in "When We All Get to Heaven"; the woman whose cooking sparked an eternal hunger in Howard Hughes, in "The Eternal Glory that is Ham Hocks"; a gay man returns from a glamorous life in DC to cope with an ornery uncle in a nursing home in "I Thought I Heard the Shuffle of an Angel's Feed"; and in "The Acts of Velmajean Swearington Hoyt and the New City of God," an elderly woman turned miracle worker, through a grace either divine or diabolical. A rich chorus of voices marked by grit, humor, suffering, and joie de vivre, If I Had Two Wings is a fully satisfying provocation and delight"--