Sacred Rage: Selected Stories

"A writer only feels like a writer when in the act. And the will, I said, is never enough . . . Where does inspiration, that sacred rage, originate? Maybe it’s just a matter of stubbornly starting something new and writing your way into the slot."—Steven Heighton

In the years before his unexpected death, Steven Heighton wrote to his longtime editor John Metcalf to say that he understood that the short story marked his most important contribution to literature, and that “after the novels, rereading and writing short stories again felt like returning home.” In the fifteen stories taken from across his four collections, Sacred Rage offers us Heighton as the moral explorer of the global suburbs, as chronicler of our innermost stories of love and fear, sleeping and waking, of a rebel “unabashedly devoted to the old pursuit,” as he once called it, “of truth and beauty.” These are stories of grace and the lack of it; of elegy and requiem; of hope and care in a world where these seem increasingly alien, stories by one of our most sharp-eyed and generous writers, whether you’re discovering them for the first time, or once again.