Elegy on Kinderklavier

"The stories in travel around the world and to the moon, and along the way they tell you everything they know. Arna Hemenway writes a fiction whose satisfactions are not merely narrative but musical, and it is a pleasure to listen to his stories as they rise into song."

— Kevin Brockmeier

Barnes & Noble Summer 2014 Discover Great New Writers Selection

The stories in explore the profound loss and intricate effects of war on lives that have been suddenly misaligned. A diplomat navigates a hostile political climate and an arranged marriage in an Israeli settlement on a newly discovered planet; a small town in Kansas shuns the army recruiter who signed up its boys as troops are deployed to Iraq, falling in helicopters and on grenades; a family dissolves around mental illness and a child's body overtaken by cancer. The moment a soldier steps on an explosive device is painfully reproduced, nanosecond by nanosecond. Arna Bontemps Hemenway's stories feel pulled out of time and place, and the suffering of his characters seem at once otherworldly and stunningly familiar. is a disquieting exploration of what it is to lose and be lost.

Arna Bontemps HemenwayThe Missouri Review, A Public SpaceSeattle ReviewEcotone