Bumping and Other Stories
Tom Barros St. Paul, MN.
“With State Champions, W. Jack Savage brings some new shades to this telling; allowing this third person narrative to feel like the eye in the sky doesn’t quite see everything. Savage’s stories are different than the ones from writers whose names are bigger than their titles. He has a sense of reality in the way things work out or don’t work out that so many writers somehow miss.”
Bumping and Other Stories
From a Southeast Asian jungle where the greatest safety is as close to the danger as you can get, to a suburban backyard where a neighbor’s cat moderates a wounded man’s personal crisis to communicate, Bumping and Other Stories is all over the map. Savage has assembled twelve very different tales including a Ukrainian prisoner’s account of the improbable events in an abandoned slaughterhouse leading to his twenty-five year incarceration, a powerful off-stage player reminded that some turns of our past can never be reconciled with our present, and an estranged anniversary couple forced to once again choose each other. The stories are hopeful and often ironic but all with a certain subjectivity that allows the reader a vote in the referendum of life’s little trials. As Bernard in Savage’s ‘Bumping’ puts it: “…the cavalcade of what-ifs that are still mine to ponder.”
