Cut Through The Bone

About the Book:

In this stripped-raw debut collection, Ethel Rohan’s thirty stories swell with broken, incomplete people yearning to be whole. Through tight language and searing scenarios, Rohan brings to life a plethora of characters — exposed, vulnerable souls who are achingly human.

– Digital: E-BOOK FOR KINDLE
– Published: December, 2010 (115 pp., paper)
– ISBN: 978-0-615-40093-8
– Trim: 5 x 8

Trailer:

Praise:

– “Filled with spot-on details and deceptively simple sentences, Rohan’s stories are, more than anything else, about loss — of children, both born and never conceived, spouses and lovers, parents, body parts, happiness, dreams, self — and about the odd, endearing, and desperate ways that people fill the void or ignore it: by befriending balloons and eating too many nuts, by inventing companions and alter-egos that become more real to them than reality.  They may seek complicity in these imagined worlds, may even occasionally get it — a husband coddles his wife’s doll, a massage therapist massages a ‘ghost’ limb — but, most often, that complicity is sought only from us, the readers, and we are fortunate, indeed, to have been invited.” — Lori Ostlund, author of The Bigness of the World

– “Cut Through the Bone is full of phantom limbs and phantom lives. These stories create a sense of loss in the reader, an ache, but thankfully they avoid dull cynicism. Instead, they bear witness to the difficulty of living for oneself while sacrificing for others. In one story a woman pleads, ‘I’m here though? Tell me I’m here.’ Ethel Rohan’s stories are like testaments to all the women and men who’ve asked the same thing of the world. Those folks remain unseen to most, but this truly talented artist isn’t blind. Ethel Rohan is one hell of a writer.” — Victor LaValle, author of Big Machine

– “Each piece in Ethel Rohan’s Cut Through the Bone is as eerily beautiful as the realistic baby dolls in her story “Lifelike”; and you will find yourself, on multiple occasions, believing that you can hear the stories breathing. In this unforgettable collection, Rohan reveals her mastery in finding the danger of ordinary objects, the way they come alive when her characters hold them in their hands. This is an unsettling and mesmerizing book.” – Kevin Wilson, author of Tunneling to the Center of the Earth

– “In Cut Through the Bone, Ethel Rohan renders, with precision and beauty, lives engulfed by loneliness and loss. Rohan creates worlds at once tremendously recognizable and tremendously strange, and the voices of her characters lingered in my mind long after I finished the final story. This is a marvelous collection, filled with moments that startle and shatter.” — Laura van den Berg, author of What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us

– “I keep thinking of more and more adjectives in an attempt to describe Ethel Rohan’s moving debut collection, which is at turns beautiful and inventive, tender and absurd, quirky and heartbreaking, dark and strange and devastating.” – Michael Kimball, author of Dear Everybody, How Much of Us There Was, and The Way the Family Got Away

– “Ethel Rohan knows a thing or two about singing with the dragonflies, smashing the mayonnaise jar, and biting Fat Greta. In less than a hundred pages, she offers thirty sharp and shapely stories of Shatter and Scraps, of Mirror and Make Over, of Fee Fi Fo Fum At the Peephole. Like one of her protagonists, I spent a few minutes in the white space, listening for the familiar sound of the car’s engine, of the bottles hitting together.” — Kyle Minor, author of In the Devil’s Territory

– “Ethel Rohan’s women, despite their wounds, are strong of spirit. She captures their resilience and their surrender in prose that is lean and utterly unflinching.” — William Walsh, author of Pathologies, Questionstruck, and Without Wax

– “The women of Cut Through the Bone are frequently disappointed — by their jobs, by their husbands and fathers, by their own faces and bodies and temperaments — and also disappointing, to those who they might love, to those who might love them back. Inscribing their fates, Ethel Rohan writes, ‘She is a fool. We are all fools,’ and of course she is right. She writes, ‘God is a fool,’ and of course she is not wrong. Still, it is not all bleakness, for here there is still some true tenderness, there some kindness left unpunished. And so Rohan’s fools go on, tricked once again into believing in the rewards of this promised world, of all the good and the bad and the absolutely human that awaits them — and us — when at last we reach not the end of things but the very center.” — Matt Bell, author of How They Were Found

From the story Reduced:

A father from our daughter’s kindergarten class sent invitations to his art exhibit downtown. The white card was premium stock and edged in gold. The envelope lined with rainbow-colored silk paper, and smooth under my fingers. My wedding was the only occasion I had ever sent such fancy invites. The kind of invite you had a drink with.

We arrived at the gallery. Its walls were white-washed behind the oil paintings and the lights hung low from the white ceiling, stalactites. Waiters dressed in black-and-white, and with dark slicked-back hair, moved through the crowd. They offered white and red wine in stemless glasses. I reached for the red wine. My husband shot me a look and requested water. We made small talk with the other parents: weather, economy, rumors that our school’s principal was about to take early-retirement.

As soon as I could get away, I visited with each of the twenty-six paintings. I pictured what I would change: put the red dog in the trout’s jaws; the black church spire atop a walled-in prison; a field of massacred trees floating in bright green blood, the men, women and children a forest. My imagination flowed along with the wine. Not that I was an artist. I liked to re-imagine things.

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