This Distance We Call Love
Orison Books, August 2021
- Winner of the Eric Hoffer Book Award
Reader Views Reviewers Choice Awards 2022-23, Winner Classics-Short Stories
- Finalist Feathered Quill Award Short Fiction
“A truly memorable read with deftly crafted and thought-provoking stories that will linger in the mind and memory long after the book itself has been finished and set back upon the shelf, "This Distance We Call Love" is especially and unreservedly recommended for personal reading lists, as well as community, college, and university library Contemporary American Literary Fiction collections.”
- Midwest Review, 2021
"As we emerge from months of isolation because of the pandemic, we’re all taking a new look at relationships, especially within families. The 13 stories in Carol Dines’ luminous new collection are not specifically about the pandemic, but they do explore the loneliness and isolation between husbands and wives, parents and children, and siblings….Dines’ talent is in immediately creating believable characters on the first page of each story, and her stories have arcs—beginning, middle, and end—unlike some short stories that don’t go anywhere. She drops in dialogue exactly when necessary to move the story…."
- St. Paul Pioneer Press, 2021
"Each of her stories in This Distance We Call Love (Orison Books) is a powerful elbow to the gut, which leaves you eager for the next situation, the next cast of characters, the next elbow. She zeroes in on family, trust, marriage, fear, sex, loss, abandonment, and the strength and danger of a child’s imagination. 13 stories that are as different in focus as they are alike in emotional power.”
- Booktrib, 2022
“There is not a single weak link in this outstanding collection, which calls to mind the most uncannily wise and funny and emotionally piercing work of Paley and Porter and Smiley.”
- Kevin McIlvoy and Christine Hale
“Carol Dines is a merciless, tender excavator of the human heart. Fans of Lorrie Moore and Alice Munro take note, each of these stories is a delicately calibrated wonder of pain, joy, and transformation.”
- Adrian Van Young, author of The Man Who Noticed Everything and Shadows in Summerland
“Carol Dines brings a poetic eye and the voice of a seasoned storyteller to This Distance We Call Love. With family at the core, her stories circle around couples, siblings, friends, all wanting to love more, love better, yet fearing they don’t quite measure up. Dines conveys the resilience of people who accept that not every dream comes true, who risk knowing what they cannot change, and yet learn to accept that if they fail—and fail they will—there will be second chances. These tender, beautifully wrought stories take us to the edges where things fall apart, a landscape of fraying marriages, grief, loss, doubt. And then they bring us back to love.”
- Miriam Karmel, author of Being Esther and Subtle Variations
“The foibles of human intimacy are writ large in these powerful stories where irony and empathy collide. Carol Dines is a writer for our times, delivering masterful, unsettling, and utterly convincing fiction that reveals what is real and heartfelt with unflinching veracity. This Distance We Call Love addresses the universal need for human connection by considering new pathways for understanding and compassion.”
- Patricia Cumbie, author of The Shape of a Hundred Hips and Where People Like Us Live
“Dines has created something beautiful and relatable. She opens a window into everyday lives and showcases their value through small moments of humor and sadness. The connections and relationships that make the world go around even when they aren’t perfect are well represented in this book.”
- Rochester Post Bulletin, 2021
