An Ornithologist's Guide to Life (26 page)

—
curled up with a good book

“These stories have bite. . . . Hood has enough perception to leave her characters room to grow after the stories end.”

—
Library Journal

“An entertaining, brightly detailed collection.”

—Kathryn Schwille,
Charlotte Observer

“Ann Hood has written a moving collection of stories about our everyday victories and defeats. Diverse and filled with surprises, these stories are bound by a common vision and with characters, lovingly drawn, who come together in incongruous and unanticipated ways.”

—Mary Morris, author of
Acts of God

“Of course there is humor and wisdom and grace in these well-crafted short stories—Ann Hood wrote them. Even in the face of adversity, her characters cannot help but revel in all that life has to offer; they know no other tack.”

—Helen Schulman, author of
P.S.

“What's possible after loss? Ann Hood's stories aim to find out by tracing the lives of families and couples blown apart by divorce, death, abandonment, and other departures. What's left? Pain, tenuous new attachments, and hope, all of which Hood explores in her energetic new collection. Wry, entertaining, and entirely of the moment,
An Ornithologist's Guide to Life
offers up honest examples of how people in the twenty-first century manage to carry on.”

—Debra Spark, author of
The Ghost of Bridgetown

“Ann Hood's writing is an unusual combination of the delicate and the fierce. The stories in her collection feature characters whose lives are as eccentric, imperfect, and mysterious as our own.
An Ornithologist's Guide to Life
is one of those collections that is a pure pleasure to dip into, for its author has so much to say, and we really want to listen.”

—Meg Wolitzer, author of
Surrender
, Dorothy

“Winging her way through caverns, kitchens, tattoo parlors, and tourist destinations, Ann Hood blesses with extraordinarism the most ordinary inhabitants of our world, proving yet again she is a rare literary bird who should be on the life list of every reader, and writer.” —Suzanne Strempek Shea,

author of Songs
from a Lead-Lined Room

A
LSO BY
A
NN
H
OOD

Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine

Waiting to Vanish

Three Legged Horse

Something Blue

Places to Stay the Night

The Properties of Water

Ruby

Do Not Go Gentle

These stories have appeared in:

Total Cave Darkness,
The Paris Review
; The Rightness
of Things,
Five Points
; The Language of Sorrow,
Five
Points
; After Zane,
Redbook
; Joelle's Mother,
Good
Housekeeping
; Escapes,
Story
; Lost Parts,
The Colorado
Review
; Dropping Bombs,
GlimmerTrain
; Inside
Gorbachev's Head,
The Colorado Review
; New People,
Gulf Coast Quarterly
; An Ornithologist's Guide to
Life,
GlimmerTrain
.

Copyright © 2004 by Ann Hood

All rights reserved

First published as a Norton paperback 2005

For information about permission to reproduce

selections from this book, write to Permissions,

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue,

New York, NY 10110

Book design by Judith Stagnitto Abbate

Production Manager: Anna Oler

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed
edition as follows:

Hood, Ann, 1956–

An ornithologist's guide to life / Ann Hood.—1st ed.

p. cm.

ISBN 0-393-05900-6

1. United States—Social life and customs—Fiction.
2. Psychological fiction, American. I. Title.

PS3558.0537075 2004

813'.54—dc22            2004006112

ISBN 978-0-393-32704-5

ISBN 978-0-393-28541-3 (e-book)

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110

www.wwnorton.com

W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.

Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT