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    Not the Same Shoes: A short story from The Secret Lives of People in Love
    Not the Same Shoes: A short story from The Secret Lives of People in Love
    Not the Same Shoes: A short story from The Secret Lives of People in Love
    Ebook29 pages31 minutes

    Not the Same Shoes: A short story from The Secret Lives of People in Love

    By Simon Van Booy

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    About this ebook

    The Secret Lives of People in Love is the first short story collection by award-winning writer Simon Van Booy. These stories, set in Kentucky, New York, Paris, Rome, and Greece, are a perfect synthesis of intensity and atmosphere. Love, loss, human contact, and isolation are Van Booy's themes. In radiant prose he writes about the difficult choices we make in order to retain our humanity and about the redemptive power of love in a violent world.

    Included in this updated P.S. edition is the new story "The Mute Ventriloquist."

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateFeb 23, 2010
    ISBN9780062001979
    Not the Same Shoes: A short story from The Secret Lives of People in Love
    Author

    Simon Van Booy

    Simon Van Booy is the author of two novels and two collections of short stories, including The Secret Lives of People in Love and Love Begins in Winter, which won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. He is the editor of three philosophy books and has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, NPR, and the BBC. His work has been translated into fourteen languages. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter.

    Read more from Simon Van Booy

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      Book preview

      Not the Same Shoes - Simon Van Booy

      Not the Same Shoes

      A short story from Not the Same Shoes

      Simon Van Booy

      Dedication

      To Maddie

      Contents

      Dedication

      Not the Same Shoes

      Acknowledgments

      An Excerpt from Tales of Accidental Genius

      About the Author

      Praise

      Credits

      Copyright

      About the Publisher

      NOT THE SAME SHOES

      It was past midnight when he reached the old mine entrance. The rain had stopped. Puddles were silvered by moonlight. Water weighed down clumps of his hair, which sat upon his forehead like small black anchors.

      The ground of Edmonson County had not been mined since Kentucky was divided by the Civil War. The structure around the entrance to the mine was a tangle of girders strangled by ivy. There were rotting coal wagons fused by rust to lengths of track.

      The air was thick and humid. Plumes of his white breath rose into the darkness. Broken glass, like fallen stars, crunched beneath his shoes. His shoes—full of holes—were the shoes she had plucked from the shop shelf years ago.

      How handsome, she had said all those years ago at the store. He had stood at the mirror slightly bowlegged, his eyes askew as they both peered at the crooked body to which the shoes were attached.

      How handsome in those shoes, she had said as they bounced their way home in the truck, such a long time ago.

      He bent his way past the

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