Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Missing Statues
    The Missing Statues
    The Missing Statues
    Ebook28 pages14 minutes

    The Missing Statues

    By Simon Van Booy

    5/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    “Simon Van Booy knows a great deal about the complex longings of the human heart, and he articulates those truths in his stories with pitch-perfect elegance. Love Begins in Winter is a splendid collection, and Van Booy is now a writer on my must-always-read list.” — Robert Olen Butler, Pulitizer Prize-winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain and Severance

    A new collection of stories from award-winning writer Simon Van Booy that explores the beauty of connection and the anguish of loss.

    In Love Begins in Winter, Simon Van Booy offers intimate scenes of tragic loss, redemptive tales of unlikely connection, and breathtaking moments that never really end. These stories, set around the world, are a perfect synthesis of grace, intensity, atmosphere, and compassion.

    From a famous French cellist who heals the heart of a lost woman to a suitor who polishes eggs, from heroic gypsies to generous gondoliers who can sing, Van Booy writes eloquently about the difficult choices we make in order to maintain our humanity.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateMay 12, 2009
    ISBN9780061926235
    The Missing Statues
    Author

    Simon Van Booy

    Simon Van Booy is the author of two novels and two collections of short stories, including The Secret Lives of People in Love and Love Begins in Winter, which won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. He is the editor of three philosophy books and has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, NPR, and the BBC. His work has been translated into fourteen languages. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter.

    Read more from Simon Van Booy

    Related to The Missing Statues

    Related ebooks

    Short Stories For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Three Odysseys

      Jan 2, 2018

      Odysseys come in all shapes and forms, from epic to personal.  Three recent odysseys range in time and theme from ancient to dystopian.  Daniel Mendelsohn’s An Odyssey launches from Homer’s epic, 2017 National Book Award-winner Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Un

      6 min read

    • Article

      The Last Waylon Party

      Jan 18, 2019

      The Last Waylon Party
      14 min read

    • Article

      Part 2 WHEN FISH FLY: The Revolt on the Slave Ship Creole

      Feb 1, 2022

      On October 25, 1841, twelve-year-old Pleasant Brown boards the Creole, a merchant slave ship sailing from Richmond to New Orleans with a “cargo” of enslaved men, women, and children. Although the United States had outlawed the trans-Atlantic slave tr

      7 min read

    • Article

      Monster

      Dec 1, 2022

      Monster
      7 min read

    • Article

      Fathead

      Nov 8, 2017

      Fathead
      16 min read

    • Article

      MUM IS MISSING Liane Moriarty

      Sep 8, 2021

      MUM IS MISSING Liane Moriarty
      7 min read

    • Article

      MUM IS MISSING Liane Moriarty

      Sep 8, 2021

      MUM IS MISSING Liane Moriarty
      7 min read

    • Article

      MUM IS MISSING Liane Moriarty

      Sep 8, 2021

      MUM IS MISSING Liane Moriarty
      7 min read

    • Article

      Speedboat

      Mar 24, 2022

      Nobody died that year. Nobody prospered. There were no births or marriages. Seventeen reverent satires were written – disrupting a cliché and, presumably, creating a genre. That was a dream, of course, but many of the most important things, I fi nd,

      14 min read

    • Article

      Excerpts From The Works Of The 2024 Whiting Award Winners

      Apr 10, 2024

      The 2024 Whiting Award winners were announced Wednesday night. Below are excerpts from their work.

      19 min read

    • Article

      Threshold

      Dec 11, 2023

      Threshold
      18 min read

    • Article

      Palabra

      Jun 1, 2023

      WHEN JOSEPH brought his young wife Palabra to visit Grandmother, his brother Ned, worried by the warmth and expansion of his chest, avoided his wife Stacey's eye, and Stacey understood that all eyes, male, female, old, young, were going henceforward

      5 min read

    • Article

      The Lost Treasure of Snake Eyes Slim

      Mar 1, 2024

      WAY BACK WHEN my ol’ great-grandpappy was just a young whippersnapper, Snake Eyes Slim was the meanest varmint west of the Rio Grande. That dirty lowdown outlaw robbed banks. He kicked dogs. He even tripped little old ladies as they crossed muddy str

      6 min read

    • Article

      Ashley McBryde

      Jun 23, 2020

      Ashley McBryde
      3 min read

    • Article

      Winning Letter

      Sep 30, 2022

      I’m a single mother who struggles financially to get through each month. When my washing machine broke I had no funds to repair it, so I asked my neighbours if I could do my washing at their place. On a Wednesday afternoon my bell rang. At the door w

      5 min read

    • Article

      Prevarication Jones

      May 1, 2019

      Prevarication Jones
      16 min read

    • Article

      ‘In the Country of Women’: Featured Nonfiction from Susan Straight

      Nov 19, 2019

      In our latest edition of featured nonfiction, we present an excerpt from National Book Award finalist Susan Straight’s new novel, In the Country of Women, out now from Catapult. The post ‘In the Country of Women’: Featured Nonfiction from Susan Strai

      8 min read

    • Article

      Ineffectual Tribute to Len

      Mar 15, 2019

      After graduate school I hung around another year and drove a cab for Iowa City Yellow Cab. The cab was a boat, a Chevrolet Caprice wagon. I could have put a mattress in the back and lived in it. I didn’t hate the job. I’d sit in the Kroger parking lo

      24 min read

    • Article

      Part 1 WHEN FISH FLY: The Revolt on the Slave Ship Creole

      Jan 1, 2022

      Part 1 WHEN FISH FLY: The Revolt on the Slave Ship Creole
      6 min read

    • Article

      ‘We Are Bridges’: Featured Nonfiction from Cassandra Lane

      Apr 20, 2021

      Lane's memoir, which won the 2020 Louise Meriwether First Book Prize, explores the author's ancestral history in order to give her future child a family history. The post ‘We Are Bridges’: Featured Nonfiction from Cassandra Lane appeared first on The

      8 min read

    • Article

      The Periodic Stranger: When exile becomes home.

      Dec 12, 2013

      My roots are in a hilltop village west of Matera, where rabbit and boar run riot in the fields. Figs, apricots, and pears hang in heavy clusters, at eye-level and within easy reach. There, the local girls are famous for their calves, made firm and st

      21 min read

    • Article

      The Periodic Stranger

      Mar 2, 2017

      My roots are in a hilltop village west of Matera, where rabbit and boar run riot in the fields. Figs, apricots, and pears hang in heavy clusters, at eye-level and within easy reach. There, the local girls are famous for their calves, made firm and st

      21 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Missing Statues

    5/5

    1 rating0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      The Missing Statues - Simon Van Booy

      The Missing Statues

      Short Story

      Simon Van Booy

      to

      LORILEE VAN BOOY

      If you are not here, then why are you everywhere?

      Contents

      Begin Reading

      Acknowledgments

      About the Author

      Other Books by Simon Van Booy

      Copyright

      About the Publisher

      The Missing Statues

      ONE BRIGHT WEDNESDAY MORNING in Rome, a young American diplomat collapsed onto a bench at the edge of St. Peter’s Square.

      There, he began to sob.

      An old room in his heart had opened because of something he’d seen.

      Soon he was weeping so loudly that a young Polish priest parking a yellow Vespa felt inclined to do something. The priest silently placed himself on the bench next to the man.

      A dog with gray whiskers limped past and then lay on its side in the shade. Men leaned on their brooms and talked in twos and threes. The priest reached his arm around the man and squeezed his shoulder dutifully. The young diplomat turned his body to the priest and wept into his cloth. The fabric carried a faint odor of wood smoke. An old woman in black nodded past, fingering her rosary and muttering something too quiet to hear.

      By the time Max stopped crying, the priest had pictured the place where he was supposed to be. He imagined the empty seat at the table. The untouched glass of water. The heavy sagging curtains and the smell of

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1