THE LEGEND'S DAUGHTER
stories by David Kranes
PRAISE FOR THE LEGEND'S DAUGHTER
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WINNER OF THE 15 BYTES BOOK AWARD
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“A story collection of real people struggling with identity, with love, with time, rooted in the rugged and indifferent beauty of Idaho where each character finds his or her mirror in water, in stone, in place. David Kranes shows how our tenacious love of life can transform any situation, large or small, into alchemy. We are all living inside these raw and well-drawn pages.”
—TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS, author of Erosion
"In these times of disconnection, David Kranes lassoes us with the delicate tether of his multiple gifts and brings us home . . . a storyteller and an elegant craftsman."
―MARY SOJOURNER, author of 29
"Kranes uses language like a knife and the worlds in his stories come off the page. We haven’t seen this Idaho before. I’m thrilled to have these stories, every one of them provocative, riveting, and robust."
―RON CARLSON, author of The Signal
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“There’s something to be said about a writer whose style is easily recognized, whose voice stands out, whose stories are readily identified. What’s remarkable about David Kranes’s writing and these stories, though, is that each story stands out on its own merit, while every story is well crafted and conceived. Nothing one-dimensional about his people, nothing one dimensional about his prose, either.”
—FOREWORD REVIEWS
“David Kranes has given us ten stories, entirely various, often splendid, sometimes hilarious, or heartbreaking, about contemporary settlers who migrate into hideout enclaves they find in the river valleys of central Idaho."
—WILLIAM KITTREDGE, author of Hole in the Sky and The Willow Field
“Kranes, a highly-heralded and accomplished playwright, holds the stylus over his unruly characters, each with their varied attributes, and allows them to reach and gather their own filaments and settle there in Idaho…or recognize their deficiencies and flee. He does this mostly through dialogue. Rich. Raw. Real words spoken with no hesitation from vulnerable people.”
—15 BYTES
"From rainbow trout jumping in the Salmon River to watering holes on the edge of McCall Lake, each of the ten stories in David Kranes’s The Legend’s Daughter transports the reader to the wilderness of Eastern Idaho."
—ZYZZYVA
May 2013 | Short Fiction | 978-1-937226-15-2 | 172 pp | $13.95
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The stories in The Legend’s Daughter inhabit present-day Idaho where fires, streams, and landscapes ask—even demand—that individuals reconsider and reorient their lives. An award-winning playwright, David Kranes infuses this collection with swift dialogue and complicated characters, including a kayaking actor, a rebellious high school teacher, and a lipstick-loving fly fisherman.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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DAVID KRANES is a prolific playwright and author of two volumes of short stories and seven novels. His 2001 novel, The National Tree, was adapted for television and aired on the Hallmark channel in November 2009. His short fiction has won literary prizes and has appeared in such magazines as Esquire, Ploughshares, and Transatlantic Review. Over 50 of his plays have been performed in New York and across the U.S., and his radio plays have been performed in the U.S., Canada, and abroad. The opera, Orpheus Lex, for which Dr. Kranes wrote the libretto, was performed at New York City’s Symphony Space in February 2010. His volume of Selected Plays was published in August of 2011. A new play, The Last Word, developed at NYC’s Lark Theater was recently given a staged reading at Salt Lake Acting Company. In his second (or is it third?) life, Mr. Kranes travels and consults the casino industry.
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Cover art by Connie Borup connieborup.com