The stories in this new collection from Tom Noyes show us everyday characters coming to simple epiphanies. The beauty of each story comes from the human connection that makes each realization possible.

A man who has just lost his father is able to see his son as a man for the first time; a new mother finds appreciation for her family in the face of a neighbor’s illness; a boy cannot learn to read yet instinctively knows how to comfort his grandmother; a wife calmly supports her husband’s dream to ride a barrel over Niagara Falls; a handicapped man records his reaction to his brother’s suicide for a physiatrist who cannot look at him, creating a birth story that is a desperate attempt to connect with people he’s never met.

The characters (some of whom we already know from Noyes’ earlier collection) make connections with others, realize their own strengths, and break out of their self-imposed slavery of doubt and insecurity.

The title comes from Einstein’s comments about ‘quantum entanglement’, by which particles that are separated by a great distance, particles that cannot even ‘see’ each other, can have an instantaneous effect on each other.

“The smart, sharply-written Spooky Action at a Distance and Other Stories conjures absurdity and pathos in undeniably American landscapes [and] offers a large and irresistible vision, its great empathy shot through with comic insight, its voices keen and energetic, the stories wonderfully surprising.” — Nancy Reisman, author of The First Desire

“Tom Noyes has a masterful eye for the quotidian details of contemporary America, and in these stories he reminds us of the strangeness and mystery at the center of even the most outwardly normal lives. His fiction is wonderfully wry and compassionate, and, yes, spooky.” — Dan Chaon, author of Among the Missing

Tom Noyes lives in Erie, PA, with his wife and daughter. He currently teaches writing and literature in the BFA program at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College. His stories have been published in a number of journals and magazines, including American Literary Review, Ascent, and High Plains Literary Review.

2008, 5½ x 8½,
160 pages (Dufour Editions)
ISBN 978-0-8023-1346-1 Paper $14.95