Much Like The Tides, Robert Wallace’s “As Breaks the Wave Upon the Sea” Ebbs and Flows Around Perceptions of Change
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In this episode 253, we visit with Robert Wallace, awards-winning author of “As Breaks the Wave Upon the Sea,” a poignant and introspective collection dealing with love, loss, and the intricate facets of relationships.
In the title story, a husband and wife alternate points of view as the husband, a soldier returned home, struggles to adjust back to his life. In another story, a man picks up kayaking after his wife’s death from colon cancer.
Kim Church, author of “Byrd,” had this to say about the book, “For the characters in these stories, loss is a jumping-off point. The question is, what comes next—into what new worlds will loss lead? This is rich territory, and Robert Wallace mines it with skill and imagination. His characters pulse with life; his settings are vividly drawn—North Carolina, Michigan, pandemic-era New York, where the streets are empty and ‘the air simply smells like air.’ This is transporting work by a gifted storyteller.”
Connect With the Author
About the Author:
Robert Wallace is the author of around fifty short stories in journals such as the N.C. Literary Review and the Bryant Literary Review, and in anthologies such as Racing Home: New Stories by award-winning North Carolina writers andHome of the Brave: Somewhere in the Sand.
For five years, he published a column for the Raleigh News & Observer. Robert is a recipient of the NC Writers’ Fellowship from the NC Arts Council and two of his short stories won the Doris Betts’ Fiction Award. His novel, A Hold on Time, was published by Paper Journey in 2007. He is a member of the NC Writers’ Network and has critiqued manuscripts for the past twenty years. Robert is a retired social worker, having worked in the field for thirty-five years.
Additional Endorsements
“In this remarkable story collection, As Breaks the Wave Upon the Sea, Robert Wallace leads us deftly, assuredly but with utmost sensitivity and understanding. His narrators, many of them female, very young to very old, show strength and self-awareness both believable and extraordinary. Wallace shows them precocious, insightful and yet human, with frailties and blind spots. These beautifully drawn characters inform us, and leave us better, more sensitive and more understanding, than before we met them.”
- Gregg Cusick, author of My Father Moves Through Time Like a Dirigible
“‘As Breaks the Wave upon the Sea’ is a beautifully woven, deeply affecting story (I wept as I read it, and so did my husband). The language is simple and direct: the relationship between a returned Iraq War soldier and his wife is depicted in all its wrenching complexity, from both points of view, in short sections that sing like prose poems. The result is a pitch-perfect whole, and one of the best stories I’ve read in a long, long time.”
- Liz Wieland, Fiction Editor for the NC Literary Review
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