We Agreed to Meet Just Here
by Scott Blackwood
Winner of the 2007
AWP Award for the Novel
Robert Eversz, Judge
“We Agreed to Meet Just Here is a lyrical mystery
about disappearance, told in precise and luminous
prose. A young lifeguard in an Austin suburb
vanishes one night while returning from a screening
of The Third Man. A doctor, ill with cancer, goes
missing from his home, and is later seen, bearded
and ragged, wandering the aisles of a grocery store.
A car is stolen, the unseen consequences tragic.
One child is given up to adoption, another is lost
up a tree. The absences are so keenly felt, in the
drifting lucidity of the author’s sentences, that every reappearance reads like a small miracle.”
—Robert Eversz, Judge
"This little gem of a book puts on lush display Scott Blackwood's talent for measuring and connecting the previously un-connectable in lived experience, and making of it an entirely new whole which we immediately accept as true, natural, exhilarating, even inevitable. He is a lovely sentence writer, and this first novel sparkles with invention."
—Richard Ford
“Extravagantly beautiful and yet offhand, We Agreed
to Meet Just Here sweeps us along with its lush,
hypnotic prose. Each of its characters is drawn to
the illusion of forbidden perfection, the belief that
the darkness, absence, and silence from which babies
arrive and into which the dead enter is numinous
proof our every wish will be fulfilled. As readers, we
see what Scott Blackwood’s characters can’t see:
a world so perfectly wrought every small gesture
or urge matters.”
—Debra Monroe,
author of Shambles
"A sense of imminent and unskirtable dread hangs like woodsmoke over Texas native Scott Blackwood's finely wrought first novel, We Agreed to Meet Just Here. . . . a triumph of language and atmospherics and — as we're drawn deeper into the characters' private worlds, hallucinations, and dreams — a travelogue of unfamiliar emotional terrain."
—Mike Shea, Texas Monthly, January 2009
"Entering Blackwood’s debut novel is like plunging straight into a dense, white fog. You have to keep your arms up, because you know something is coming, even if you can’t see it. And Blackwood plumbs that sense of dreadful anticipation for all it’s worth in this numinous, abbreviated tale of suburban woe."
—Jonathan Messinger, Time Out Chicago / Issue 208 : Feb 19–25, 2009
"What's most amazing about 'We agreed to meet just here' — the title pops into the hit-and-run driver's mind when Natalie, smiling, 'explodes in the Blazer's highbeams' — is Blackwood's trenchant and expedient use of ideas and language."
—Steve Bennett, San Antonio Express-News, 1/31/2009
Praise for In the Shadow of Our House: Stories
"Powerful. Ambitious. Blackwood is especially good
at making things fit in stories that don’t seem to fit at
first. Beautiful music, line by line."
—Andre Dubus,
author of Dancing After Hours
"Acute and nimble stories . . . so honest as they
capture the dapple of emotions and perceptions that cross the mind like sunlight and shadow on a river."
—Julie Gray, New York Times Book Review
"A strong debut collection about family disaster and betrayals . . . real time is revealed to be unrevealing,
and characters linger like ghosts."
—Kirkus
New
Issues Poetry & Prose, Western Michigan University, Dept. of English,
1903 W. Michigan Ave., Kalamazoo, MI 49008-5331
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