About the Book
These stories take place in the space where the rational and irrational intersect — the space governed by The Law of Miracles. Writing with a remarkable range of invention, Gregory Blake Smith has created a world in which his characters navigate between the everyday and the extraordinary: an aged Russian woman who lives simultaneously in the St. Petersburg of iPods and BMWs and in the starving Leningrad of the Siege; a Venetian art conservator who loves the women of the Renaissance paintings he restores but cannot bear the touch of the woman at his side; a down-and-out slot-machine technician who calculates the probability of his wife’s dying. Yet for all their variety of setting and subject, there runs through each of these stories a thread of the miraculous, a suspicion that the transcendent lies just at the edge of perception.
Excerpt
Awards
- Juniper Prize for Fiction, 2011
- Minnesota Book Award, 2012
Media Coverage
- FICTION: “The Law of Miracles,” by Gregory Blake Smith
StarTribune, July 10, 2012 - Northfield author wins Minnesota Book Award
Northfield News, April 30, 2012