Lost Love - by Peter Guralnick (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Stunning stories that explore the countless ways we pursue love and occasionally misplace it, or sometimes just let it slip through our fingers.

Peter Guralnick's storytelling voice is a marvel: uniquely conversational, consistently erudite and witty. In these stories he has created an unforgettable cast of dreamers, misfits, and observers struggling to navigate the distance between who they are and who they set out to be. Like Guralnick's prize-winning biographies of Elvis Presley, Sam Cooke and Sam Phillips, these stories find their meaning in perfectly observed detail: They are deeply felt and deeply examined, while never failing to show empathy for characters longing to find a place in a world where everyone else seems to have found theirs.

In one story, a chance meeting in a Key West bar brings fleeting refuge to two damaged souls. In another, an aging creative writing professor confronts his own loss of self-belief in the face of a student's unmistakable brilliance. The suicide of a childhood friend twenty-five years after childhood is over brings two teenage lovers together for a brief, fragile time. At the heart of the collection, Guralnick transports readers to the smoky rhythm and blues bars, ragged baseball diamonds, bookstores, and book-lined apartments of Boston and Cambridge in the 1950s and '60s. Three stories follow Danny, a young boy growing up in a second-and-third-generation family that is confident in the promise of assimilation: a grandfather brimming over with positive energy; a father returned from the war to pick up an interrupted life he can't wait to begin; a mother struggling with an increasingly debilitating deafness that threatens to upend her world.

Collectively, these stories evince a heartbroken beauty, shot through with a profound sensitivity to all that can hurt us, all that holds us back, all that makes us human. With this collection Peter Guralnick achieves a new creative high point. As writer Mark Harris (Bang the Drum Slowly) said of his novel, Nighthawk Blues, some years ago, "We can all be pleased and grateful that Guralnick came to fiction. We knew he was a comprehensive reporter, and now we know that he is extraordinarily able as a storyteller, too."

Review Quotes

"Lost Love is a revelation, a brilliant collection of stories by a major American writer. Peter Guralnick's poignant and darkly comic short fiction evokes a lost world of Harvard Square bohemians and restless teenage existentialists, perched on the cusp of the Sixties, the ground trembling beneath their feet."

--Tom Perrotta, author of Election and The Leftovers

"Deeply felt and deeply imagined, these stories go straight for the jugular--and the heart. Filled with damaged souls and meaningful moments, Lost Love is, in my opinion, Peter Guralnick's very best work."

--Lee Smith, author of The Last Girls

"Peter Guralnick's stories give testimony to the truth that fiction best delivers. Each narrative opens like a portal, swiftly transporting readers to another time and place, another world."

--Lorraine M. López, author of The Gifted Gabaldón Sisters

"The stories in Peter Guralnick's brave, tender collection chart submerged continents where heartbreak can lurk behind every warm, elegantly crafted sentence. This is a beautiful book."

--Tom Piazza, author of City of Refuge

"Like some kind of miraculous stray artifact from the postwar canon, the tales in Guralnick's Lost Love are each in themselves perfectly lucid, yet form a shape around a mystery, the ultimately elusive passage into selfhood."

--Jonathan Lethem, author of The Fortress of Solitude

"You may know Peter Guralnick as one of America's very greatest music writers. Now he turns his attention to popular music's themes: his characters are lost, lonely, confused, heartbroken, lustful, regretful. This is a terrific collection of stories, absorbing, wise, surprising and moving."

--Nick Hornby, author of High Fidelity

About the Author

Peter Guralnick is the author of two previous books of short stories, published when he was twenty and twenty-three, and the novel, Nighthawk Blues. Some of his other books include Lost Highway (originally published by Godine in 1979); a prize-winning two-volume biography of Elvis Presley, Last Train to Memphis and Careless Love; Sweet Soul Music; acclaimed biographies of Robert Johnson and Sam Cooke; and Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock 'n' Roll, which was a finalist for the international Plutarch Award for Best Biography of the Year. His most recent books are Looking to Get Lost: Adventures in Music and Writing and The Colonel and the King: Tom Parker, Elvis Presley, and the Partnership That Rocked the World.