A Book Recommendation from MFA Alumnus Fei Sun

For someone who published only one book of fiction in his life, “The Ranger, the Cook, and a Hole in the Sky” is more than one third of all Norman Maclean’s fiction-writing known to the public. Yet, this ninety-page story is about a group of people he spent only one summer with, and the summer happened half a century before he wrote it. Of this group, he respected, admired, and wished to follow in the footsteps of one; he disliked, was jealous of, and toward the end, pitied another; he thought he belonged to such a group, and he wanted to belong. Nevertheless, when the next summer came, he had turned eighteen, life moved on, and he would never see these people again.

At first I found it peculiar that an author who seemed to have such a high bar for what was worth writing would choose to write about people he had so briefly known, but then I felt this was precisely the charm of the story: our awe at how people come and go in life, or that against our existence, the many possibilities of life, even life itself, come and go. And this “come and go” is not a pure sense of loss. Like the beautiful but brief summer snow on the mountaintop that Maclean wrote about within the same story, it has underneath it the earth that is very much alive, and what quickly melts away only reveals the more steady and everlasting.

More about the author:

Fei Sun’s fiction has received Ploughshares’s Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction, Pleiades’s Kinder-Crump Award for Short Fiction, and Mississippi Review’s Fiction Prize. Her short stories have also appeared in Ruminate, Five Points, Oyster River Pages, Southern Humanities Review, and Wigleaf. Born and raised in Shanghai, she first came to the U.S. for school and studied physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She then pursued a PhD in the same discipline, though she left in the third year to try writing. Subsequently, she received her MFA from Northwestern University. She is currently at work on a novel. When she is not writing, she likes to crochet and play board games with her husband.