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    French Artist Killed in Sunday's Earthquake: A short story from The Secret Lives of People in Love
    French Artist Killed in Sunday's Earthquake: A short story from The Secret Lives of People in Love
    French Artist Killed in Sunday's Earthquake: A short story from The Secret Lives of People in Love
    Ebook27 pages15 minutes

    French Artist Killed in Sunday's Earthquake: 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
    ISBN9780062001931
    French Artist Killed in Sunday's Earthquake: 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.

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      Book preview

      French Artist Killed in Sunday's Earthquake - Simon Van Booy

      French Artist Killed in Sunday’s Earthquake

      A short story from The Secret Lives of People in Love

      Simon Van Booy

      Dedication

      To Maddie

      Contents

      Dedication

      French Artist Killed in Sunday’s Earthquake

      Acknowledgments

      An Excerpt from Tales of Accidental Genius

      About the Author

      Praise

      Credits

      Copyright

      About the Publisher

      FRENCH ARTIST KILLED IN SUNDAY’S EARTHQUAKE

      The final moments of her life. Marie-Françoise lay crushed under tons of rubble.

      The fish she had been eating was still in her mouth.

      Her eyes would not open.

      She could sense the darkness that encapsulated her. She could not feel her body, as though during the fall, her soul had slipped out and lay waiting for the exact moment when it would disappear from the world.

      Then her life, like a cloud, split open, and she lay motionless in a rain of moments.

      The green telephone in her grandparents’ kitchen next to the plant.

      She could feel the cool plastic of the handle and the sensation of cupping it under her ear. She could hear a voice at the other end of the line that she recognized as her own.

      The weight of her mother’s shoes as she carried them into the bedroom.

      The idea

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