The Touching That Lasts: Stories

Explore the human longing for connection in these fourteen deceptively simple stories that stay hooked in the imagination long after the final page.

In these fourteen breathtaking stories, award-winning author Kent Nelson explores how very different people from disparate cultures (a rancher involved in a fight for water rights, a musician hired to play for a catatonic woman, a Native young man and woman coming of age on an Arizona reservation, a bird-carver from Vermont, among others) all long, in their own ways, for connection to loved ones and to their own histories. Nelson demonstrates his deep understanding for the ways our lives are affected and enlightened by commonplace dramas of lovemaking and landscape, divorce and discovery. Each exquisitely crafted story possesses its own lyrical sense of place.

Experience the stories that Kent Haruf, author of Plainsong and Eventide, said ＂simply shine with subtlety and intelligence.＂

Mark Spragg, author of An Unfinished Life and Where the Rivers Change Direction, also praises Nelson, ＂He opens our hearts as only an honest storyteller may. Every story surprises . . . each drama unfolding forthrightly, naturally, each story spare, genuine, and singular.＂

Kent Nelson has published four novels, six collections of short stories, and 156 stories in magazines. He has won the Colorado Book Award, the Reading the West Book Award, and the Drue Heinz Literature Prize. His stories have been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories, The Best of the West, Pushcart, O. Henry, and The Best American Mystery Stories. He has held two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Ouray, Colorado.