A City Full of Rain

About the Book

A City Full of Rain is novelist Gary Eberle’s first-ever collection of short fiction.  Most of the stories in A City Full of Rain originally appeared in literary magazines around the United States and now appear together for the first time.  Since some of the stories were conceived as companion pieces, this collection allows the reader for the first time to see the interconnections among the characters, settings and plots in the way the author originally intended.

The first gathering of stories, “In Another Country,” includes two stories set in Japan, one in France and one on board a Caribbean cruise ship.  The characters in these stories try to come to grips with the alien cultures they find themselves in, and also with sudden realizations about themselves and the lives back home they had hoped to escape through their travels.  “Stes-Maries-de-la-Mer” won one of the first-ever  PrePress awards in 1992 and was published in a prestigious anthology of emerging Michigan writers.  

The gathering called “Five Rooms in a City Full of Rain” is set in Detroit on a hot August night.  A storm sweeps down over the city and much of the city is plunged into a power blackout.  Five people, sheltered from the storm in five different rooms in the Metro area, wait for the dawn.  Four of these stories appeared separately in literary magazines over a period of a few years, but now they are drawn together for the first time and can be read in the order the author intended.

The two stories collected in “Mistaken Identities” are concerned with the psychology of projection.  We often think our problems are caused by other people, but this duet of stories, which both take place  in the National Cathedral in Washington D.C. during the same organ concert, suggests that we carry our problems within ourselves. Like the Bach fugue at the center of the stories, our emotional lives are a tangle of themes and counterthemes that run through our lives.  In the end, the patterns that bring us together and take us apart  may be more complex than we ever could imagine.

In the section “First Person, Singular,” Eberle weaves together three stories set in the gritty industrial city of Toledo, Ohio, where he grew up.  Three coming-of-age stories take their narrator into the belly of violence, into the strange world of madness and adult sexuality, and into the confusions of friendship and first love.  “Holy Toledo,” in which a young boy witnesses an adventure gone terribly wrong, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize after it appeared in The MacGuffin.

The collection concludes with two forays into fantasy.  In “Trajectory,” a toy rocket launched by a boy forty years ago suddenly lands at the feet of the middle-aged man he has become.  And in “House of Dreams,” set in the near future, a suburban woman checks into a mysterious storefront in a strip mall to relearn the lost art of dreaming.

Eberle’s fiction writing has been praised by such publications as Publisher’s Weekly, The Detroit Free Press, and The New York Times Book Review.  When his novel Angel Strings appeared in 1995, The Detroit Free Press wrote, “The narrative voice in Angel Strings is plaintive and funny and oddly nostalgic. . .. [Angel Strings] is what every book lover secretly hankers for: a good read.”  And Robert Plunket in The New York Times Book Review said, “When you’re writing about a crew like this, the trick is to make the humor seem natural and unforced, and I must say that Mr. Eberle pulls it off quite credibly.  There is a scene . . . that kept me giggling for 10 or 12 pages. . . . Mr. Eberle is a very funny writer.”  Other good reviews came from The Grand Rapids Press, Publishers’ Weekly, the ALA Booklist, and even Acoustic Guitar Player.

Angel Strings was selected as a “Best Book for Young Persons” by the New York Public Library.

Eberle’s &

About the Author

Gary Eberle is the author of the critically praised novel Angel Strings, and of the non-fiction book The Geography of Nowhere: Finding One’s Self in the Postmodern World. In his professional writing career, he has worked as a newspaper and magazine feature writer and columnist, winning a national editorial writing award in 1993. His fiction has also won awards in Michigan and nationally. He is on the faculty of Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he teaches literature, humanities and writing.