Something That Feels Like Truth (Switchgrass Books)

Named a Michigan Notable Book for 2014 by the Library of Michigan Winner of the 2014 Midwest Book Award for short fiction Gold medal recipient for “Best Regional Fiction” from the Independent Publishers’ IPPY awards Reflecting the unique insights of an engineer who began writing fiction late in life, these and the other stories in Donald Lystra’s Something That Feels Like Truth take us on a page-turning journey through the American heartland to as far away as Paris. In fierce but tender prose, Lystra writes about ordinary people navigating life’s difficult boundaries—of age and love and family—and sometimes finding redemption in the face of searing regret. Although spanning half a century, these are timely stories that speak about the limits we place on ourselves, both from fear and for the sake of those we love, and of our willingness to confront change.

From the publisher: Donald Lystra’s first novel, Season of Water and Ice, was the winner of the 2009 Midwest Book Award for fiction, making a nice publicity splash for our fiction imprint, Switchgrass, which proudly published it. The book garnered lots of publicity too, earing praise for Switchgrass in the pages of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the Detroit Free Press, Time Out Chicago magazine, and other venues. This volume gathers a bracing selection of short stories by Lystra that are very much cut from the same cloth as his highly acclaimed novel. The stories in Something That Feels Like Truth confound expected plot turns, and Lystra develops his characters patiently and naturally, bringing them into convincing and honest actions. Lystra was a career engineer before retiring and launching a second career as a writer: I like to think this is why his fiction operates with such mathematical precision. Every plot point in every story here holds an integral part in the imbuing of its beauty and meaning. You can also tell Lystra has read a lot of Hemingway and Chekov: and that he aspires to be an inheritor of their effectively concise tradition. But there’s a touch of Cheever in Lystra’s stories as well: what that master storyteller did for the suburbs of New York, Lystra does for the Midwest.