Ocean State

Jean McGarry teaches in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. Ocean State is her eighth book of fiction. Dream Date, Gallagher's Travels, Home at Last, The Very Rich Hours, and Airs of Providence have also been published by Johns Hopkins. Her short stories have appeared in, among other publications, The New Yorker, The Yale Review, Boulevard, and The Southwest Review.

McGarry's stories are psychological studies constructed around a moment of reckoning-a first date at the church social, a wedding day tomorrow, the last reveries of a dying man. She burrows deeply into the sensibilities of recognizable, ordinary people-our younger selves, sisters and brothers we could know, parents and adult children we have been or have observed. Providence Journal 2010 Exceptionally intense, intricately structured, and as arresting and consistently engaging as fractal art... the stories trace characters' sense of a double existence: the life inside family, defined and constrained by McGarry's meticulous details, and the boundless life of the spirit. Her literary progenitors range from Willa Cather to Virginia Woolf--but she brings a savage lyricism to her stories, a sense of rage contained perilously by wit and intelligence, that gives the stories a menacing aspect, like watching a man threatening suicide walk on a ledge. The Hopkins Review 2011

• Part I: Family Happiness Chapter 1. Family HappinessChapter 2. The Sweetness of Her NameChapter 3. The Tree of LifePart II: TransferenceChapter 4. TransferenceChapter 5. Gold LeafChapter 6. A Full HousePart III: The Wedding GownsChapter 7. The Wedding GownsChapter 8. Family RomanceChapter 9. The OfferingPart IV: Ocean StateChapter 10. Dream DateChapter 11. Welcome Wherever He WentChapter 12. The Night BeforeChapter 13. Ocean StateAcknowledgements