The Hot Climate of Promises and Grace ─ 64 Stories

In his numerous years of worldly travels, a writer came to know many women. To him they told countless personal stories, revealing their wit and their work. Strange mix as their stories were, it became clear to the writer that he must chronicle these untold stories and bring them forth so that others may learn of these remarkable women as well. Stories of the plain and the transcendental; the practical and the miraculous; the hidden and the influentialthese women who have conjured a way to love, and to give, so as to illuminate and transform the lives around them.

From widely anthologized poet, novelist, and essayist Steven Nightingale comes The Hot Climate of Promises and Grace: 64 Storiesa collection of short stories that fluently speak to one another forming a spectacularly diverse, humorous, and interrelated body of work. These are stories of women rising to power. They are at work in the worldand within the world, as well. Women of curious knowledge, natural grace, rough sensuality, and mischievous instinctsthey are remaking the world. Their labor is conscious, uncanny, fierce, strange, and has often been kept secret because it was their secret to keep.

Steven Nightingale is the author of two novels and six books of sonnets, as well as numerous essays. Most recently, his bookGranada: Pomegranate in the Hand of God, a book about the city of Granada, Spain, was published by Counterpoint Press. Nightingale’s poetry has been widely anthologized, and he has taught poetry in more than fifty schools and universities. His interests include the medieval art of Spain and Italy, the wild country of the American West and the Caribbean, cooking for his treasured wife and daughter, astronomy, venture capital, the quantitative arts, and Emily Dickinson, whom he loves. He lives in Woodside, CA, with his family.