True Places Never Are

Winner of the Moon City Short Fiction Award

In Cate McGowan’s debut collection, winner of the 2014 Moon City Short Fiction Award, True Places Never Are introduces us to an assortment of characters, a passenger manifest voyaging through loss and salvation. The book’s title borrows from Moby-Dick: “It is not down in any map; true places never are.” McGowan’s characters are indeed off the chart; they venture into wondrous worlds as knotty and distressing as the locales they aim to leave. They will haunt readers.

Blue, with his frenetic need to paint, longs for what could be a mermaid with narcolepsy. Tara and David, floating between childhood and adulthood, intertwine languidly on the cusp of . . . something. Violet Gray Witherspoon, a name of nouns, spills yearning verbs onto secret pages. Jebediah dances with sacrifice, then freedom. Superheroes emerge in unlikely places. Rats expose themselves in the prison yard. A crop of immigrant birds alights its unlikely way through the countryside.

Cate McGowan’s characters will inhabit readers’ dreams. Her prose is florid and full, yet keenly concise. Her words pull readers into the picture, and from inside, they can taste the paint upon the canvas. This book will take you to places where you never dreamed you’d visit and aren’t quite sure you want to stay, but you won’t regret the journey.

Praise for
TRUE PLACES NEVER ARE

As I read these remarkable stories, I fell headlong for Cate McGowan’s tender, fierce, and deliciously complicated characters. Gritty and gorgeous, True Places Never Are is an astonishing collection and McGowan is a one-of-a-kind talent.—Laura van den Berg, author of Third Hotel, Find Me, and The Isle of Youth

Cate McGowan’s debut story collection, True Places Never Are, travels nimbly through geography and time, taking us through cities of the past and present via timeless rural towns. Here, we encounter the fullness of human existence distilled into moments of elemental violence, thwarted artistic ambition, and palpable yearning for true connection—with family, lovers, and the land.—Wendy Rawlings, author of The Agnostics

Cate McGowan’s writing is so succinct, so lovely and so full of emotion that the reader leaves the book hungry for more but also comforted by a sense of satisfied awe. These are stories of powerful resonance, exploring the human condition in all its beauty and ugliness and everything in between. True Places Never Are introduces us to a major new voice in American fiction.—Silas House, author of Southernmost, Clay’s Quilt, A Parchment of Leaves, and Eli the Good

Whether she’s writing about a farm boy’s altercation with an irrigation machine, a female prisoner, or a fictional French Dadaist (in what is truly a tour de force), Cate McGowan’s stories have all of the ferocity and precision of her fellow Georgian, Flannery O’Connor, but McGowan is more compassionate. And more hip. I felt the same sense of excitement about the variety and heart in this collection as I did, many years ago, reading Jayne Anne Phillips’s Black Tickets. True Places Never Are is an impressive debut.—Robin Lippincott, author of Mr. Dalloway, In the Meantime, and Blue Territory: A Meditation on the Life and Art of Joan Mitchell

This collection of stories lives up to its title, in that they take us deftly to true places we have never been, places that we get to know through cunning observation and beautiful prose. With Cate McGowan as our gracious and expert guide, showing us just what to look for, we come away enlightened and delighted for having made the journey to these places that feel both happily, and sometimes painfully, familiar. This book is armchair travel at its very, very best.—James Thomas, co-editor of New Sudden Fiction and Flash Fiction International