Hosts - Paperback

A glorious collection of stories, cause for celebration and gratitude. The final one, "Providence," gestures toward all the others, suggesting the hidden design lying just beneath the surface of our lives connecting us all. Stories of children, of wounded veterans and lonely widows, of gay men and remembered blue roses painted on a ceiling. Of parasites and paradise. But the story I hope never to forget is called Kick and must have been written at the dictation of the gods. All honor.

-Kathleen Hill

Alfred Corn's stories are just as elegant, complex, and perceptive as are his poems, full of surprises and passages of melancholy and yearning that recall the great short-fiction boom of the 1950s and 1960s. What a pleasure to read such a rewarding and sophisticated collection. -Rick Moody

Alfred Corn has an eye, and he uses his acute vison to great effect, an ability to make the reader aware of a whole world, and, too, the wonder of being aware, which luminous wonder is the pleasure of these stories. Having read a story by Alfred Corn, I look about at all that is around me for being suddenly magically there.

-David Plante