Night Swimming: Stories

Pete Fromm continues to astound with this collection of beautiful short stories. I discovered Pete's fiction after reading his stunning first novel "How All This Started" and I've continued to really enjoy his work here. One of America's most under rated talents. Highly recommended. How All This Started: A Novel

Pete Fromm is simply an excellent writer of short stories. As of late, I see more and more fiction writers drawing their characters from the fringes. I guess their thinking is that the more eccentric, strange, and bizarre their characters, the better their stories. For me, though, their thinking is skewed. Bizarre characters don't invite me in as a reader. They push me away. I can't connect with them. But, I can connect with the characters of Pete Fromm's wonderful Night Swimming. His are people we know. His people are us. I think of the father in the story "Doors". He's a man who's simply trying to figure out his teenage son -- this angry stranger he seemingly suddenly finds living under his roof. Our children growing away from us. Down to earth theme -- but a theme we can connect with. Fromm's characters are real people. Pete Fromm writes a fiction that can truly be called literary and important. With so many literary magazines floating around, I find myself feeling as though I'm opening oysters as I peruse their pages. And so many of their fiction writers leave me feeling as though I am holding an empty shell. But Fromm is definetely a pearl. Buy this book. You'll enjoy reading it.

Night Swimming is a collection of Pete Fromm's fascinating short stories, full of odd-ball characters who seem somehow strangely familiar to us. Young Fromm peeks through the windows of dozen homes whose families are as disfunctional as our own, but whose starkly real situations and reactions enlighten our own daily efforts to enoble our dry, brown lives. One young man gives up his dreams in order to become a janitor in his mother's nursing home, so he can be closer to her in her last days. An couple torn by childlessness struggle over a decision to adopt. An FAA investigator accustomed to eavesdropping on the last "blackbox" conversations of doomed pilots, seems equally an observer in his own relationship with his son, as they stand in their darkened house: " Victor reached an arm out to his son but touched only emptiness." A youth stuck in a desperately boring home finds excitement and kindness in his dangerously wild older sister. But beyond the fascinating characters, Fromm brings us clean, fast-paced detail -- a key to his creation of intimacy: "This isolation is womblike somehow, but all wrong; the world nothing but white noise, dirty white sky, dirty white ice; no place where one ends and the other begins...as I wind through the turn, stumbling on the broken, lumpy ice, the wind begins to nudge me forward, pushing me, urging me on...I don't want to find what it wants me to see." Fromm's views of the Montana landscape become interior portraits of the hearts of lonely children and struggling grownups. His vision is vivid, understandable, and identifiable. His are not words, but thoughts in the reader's head. Some of us study our craft for decades hoping to approach what Pete Fromm has produced in six years. So we read this book to revel in its strange, familiar worlds. And to see how it's done, when it's done well.