Showing results for "Jamie Quatro" in All Categories

Married 20 years to Thomas and living in Nashville with their two children, Maggie is drawn ineluctably into a passionate affair while still fiercely committed to her husband and family. What begins as a platonic intellectual and spiritual exchange between writer Maggie and poet James, gradually transforms into an emotional and erotically-charged bond that challenges Maggie's sense of loyalty and morality, drawing her deeper into the darkness of desire.

The hypnotically intimate, urgent stories in I Want to Show You More are about lives stretched between spirituality and sexuality in the New American South. In narrative modes ranging from the traditional to the fabulist, these stories are interconnected explorations of God, illicit sex, raising children and running. Jamie Quatro’s stories confront us with dark theological complexities, fractured marriages, and mercurial temptations.

Jamie Quatro's stories are uncensored, sometimes eccentric explorations of life - its darkness and brilliance - written in a voice that David Means describes as "bright, sharp, startling, utterly distinctive, passionate, and secretive". Quatro writes from Lookout Mountain, Georgia, where she lives with her husband, Scott, and their children. "Wave Function Collapse" is a stand-alone story narrated by the author, and is a great introduction to her writing. Download her new collection, I Want to Show You More, also available at Audible.

Throughout the collection, a mother in her late 30s relates the various stages of her affair while other characters lay bare their own notions of God, illicit sex, raising children and running: a wife comes home with her husband to find her lover’s corpse; marathon runners on a Civil War battlefield must carry phallic statues; a girl’s embarrassment over attending a pool party with her quadriplegic mother turns to fierce devotion under the pitying gaze of other guests; and a husband asks his wife to show him how she would make love to another man.

Maggie is entirely devoted to her husband, Thomas, their two beautiful children, and God. But then what begins as innocent letter writing with poet James starts to become something far more erotically charged, their meeting of minds threatening to become a meeting of bodies. As everything Maggie believes in is thrown into doubt, the listener is drawn ever deeper into the battleground of her soul.

After 20 years of marriage and 20 years of imaginary romances, Maggie Ellmann meets a man who makes all the previous ones seem like an augury. However, the stronger Maggie's feelings are, the bigger her determination is to end the romance and again be a “good wife and mother”, and a good Christian. So Maggie starts to pray to God to pull her out of the affair. Fire Sermon is a debut novel of an acclaimed poet and short story writer. It's lyrical and intense. It talks about lust and its nature, the womanhood trammeled by the rules of faith, and the breaking of taboos.