Where We Are Now

A collection of stories that Carolyn Osborn has developed over two decades, Where We Are Now is about a single family, the Moores. Marianne is the main narrator of these stories about her mother's family. In the first tale, "The Greats," her relatives are so distant Marianne can only give brief glimpses of the eccentric Moores. "The Grands," an O. Henry Prize–winning story, first introduced readers to many of the characters who inhabit Where We Are Now. By knowing the Moores, we begin to know Marianne, who tries to understand them. Curious as she is, she must continually accept the mystery of reality. Aware of the need for family mythology, she orders her world as best she can with what she is given by reacting, reflecting, inventing, and enlarging on the fragments. Other narrators reveal omissions Marianne can never know. Marianne's life and the lives of the Moores have a definitively southern flavor; they mirror fading 19th-century morality, an acceptance of eccentricity, the habit of storytelling, a strong consciousness of place, and the influence as well as the particularity of family. These stories are an attempt to show the failures and triumphs of love, the necessity of forgiveness, and the usefulness of different sorts of families.

"Carolyn Osborn’s thoroughly admirable new collection, Where We Are Now, is all about those strangers we call family. Osborn’s collection is wise, funny, and moving, the mature work of a skilled writer. The characters are vivid—Tennesseans, Texans, and New Mexicans, orphans and parents, aunts, and uncles, sisters and brothers. Some are rascals, others are tyrants, and all of them grow on you. Wherever you read Where We Are Now, you’ll be transported to a front porch on a summer afternoon, where you’re delighting in the company of an old friend who is telling you at last the secrets you’ve wanted to know."  —Laura Furman, series editor, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and author, The Mother Who Stayed

"[Carolyn Osborn] has earned a place as one of Texas’s finest writers with prose that is precise and full of heart, and this book of Tennessee exemplifies that."  —Austin American-Statesman

"One of Texas’s finest writers, Carolyn Osborn, is back with a collection of her award-winning stories. Osborn’s stately lyricism, plain-spoken epiphanies, and hard-won truths are all on superb display. Fans of Alice Munro should have a look at this indispensable collection."  —Sarah Bird, author, Above the East China Sea

"[The] stories read like chapters of a novel and focus on generations within a family. The stories interweave themes, events, characters and even objects, such as a blue fence or wax fruit. Mysteries are solved, or at least revisited. Characters have interconnecting complications."  —Dallas Morning News

Carolyn Osborn is the recipient of a Distinguished Prose Award from the Antioch Review, a Lon Tinkle Lifetime Achievement Award from the Texas Institute of Letters, and an O. Henry Award. She is the author of Contrary People, The Fields of Memory, A Horse of Another Color, Uncertain Ground, and Warriors & Maidens. She lives in Austin, Texas.