Catch and Release
Charles “Catch” Sherman has lived at the corner of Fourth and Lafayette—in the house his grandfather built—his entire life. While content in the river town of Beaumont, Iowa, he knows life will be different for his eldest daughter, Edie, a gifted physics student. Set in the late 1950s through the 1970s, Catch and Release is a story about holding on, letting go, and the leaps we must take to become the people we are meant to be.
Laura Farmer is drawn to place as a writer. Growing up, she loved exploring how other people used and moved through their homes, including apartments, rambling houses, and an old nursing home with a gloriously creepy elevator. Her writing explores how a home is created and how it can be maintained—the spirit, not just the shell.
Farmer also finds inspiration in her home state of Iowa. Her collection of short stories, Direct Connection, is also set in Iowa, and she has published fiction in The Iowa Review, North American Review, and other journals. Farmer directs the Dungy Writing Studio at Cornell College, where she helps students tell stories of their own.
“I loved this book and read it in one enraptured sitting, moved by the beautiful economy of the sentences, the essential kindness of the vision, the sense of love and alertness and acceptance that suffuse it. Farmer gives me hope for American fiction—that it can do justice to the actual nuances of life as we live it, to the goodness and frailty of the people that we are, and that we know. The experience of reading this lovely book will, I know, stay with me a long time.”
—George Saunders, author of Liberation Day
ISBN: 978-1-946163-63-9
Page Count: 168
Fiction
Paperback
Publication Year: 2024
