Books to Buy & Read

Twelve stories that span the Mormon Corridor—a geographical as well as, now, globally psychic space inhabited by America’s most “successful” indigenous religion.

At times rendered through life’s daily grind (politics, marriage, acquiring an STD… and too many parking tickets), other times through the supernatural and fabulist (angels and personified names of the dead ripped from the real-life Utah mountain vault filled with genealogical records), these are Latter-day Saints who see things “Mormonly” (with apologies to “New Englandly” Emily Dickinson) both driven and riven by their frenetic and sacralized sense of community, their orthodoxy, their doubts and their awkward (often futile) rebellions to comical, poignant, sometimes harrowing ends.

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These stories “convey the longing of those who are in some sense out of communion: lonesome, solemn, wandering, cast out, unrecognized by the Church or their own people. But they need not worry that there is no book that—transcending orthodoxy and disbelief—captures enough in-between-ness to find themselves in. David G. Pace has written it. That’s what you call the power of a text.
—From the Foreword by Christopher T. Lewis
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David Pace’s exhilarating new collection, American Trinity, fashions a new set of mythologies from the material of Mormon America—tales of doubters and believers, angels and heretics, the sacred and the profane. With wisdom and humor, these ambitious stories use the particularities of LDS culture and history as a lens to examine the most profound, universal elements of human life—producing a collection that speaks powerfully to Mormons and non-Mormons alike.
–Shawn Vestal, author of Daredevils and Godforsaken Idaho
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Pace’s short fiction is affecting and illuminating. He writes unflinchingly, depicting those at the margins – the doubters, the diffident, and the disconsolate, with sensitivity, compassion, and humour.
–Carys Bray, author of A Song for Issy Bradley

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There is deep pleasure to be found in the pages of David Pace’s gorgeous collection of short fiction, American Trinity. These are moving narratives, steeped in wise and evocative contemplation, luminous with Mormon Americana. Pace deftly plumbs the sometimes dark, often difficult depths of faith and loss with an insider’s knowledge and an angel’s compassion. He is, without doubt, one of the finest storytellers to come out of the Mormon experience.
–Robert Hodgson Van Wagoner, author of The Contortionists and Dancing Naked

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A former Mormon, David Pace with his deep concern for humanity and marvelous insights, brings members’ struggles to light, showing how the LDS religion both feeds and strains the heart. These stories are brilliantly rendered, wildly funny and touching, as Pace reveals his characters’ conflicts with their beliefs in Mormonism’s rigid rules. We learn about the quirks of baptism of the dead, how sexual relationships are affected, as well as members’ unique turmoils about leaving the religion, or going back to it, and much more. A lapsed Catholic, I feel that any Mormon or other person raised with strict faith, will love these stories as well as non-religious readers curious about the secret lives of the Mormon faithful, and unfaithful. I could not put this book down. Well researched and intelligent, this is some of the finest fiction I have read about a religious culture, and some of the finest fiction I have ever read.
–Nancy Takacs, author of Dearest Water

The Path and the Gate

The Book of Mormon prophet Nephi describes the journey to eternal life as going through a gate of ordinances and traveling a “straight and narrow path.” Twenty-three authors took that gospel roadmap passage as a prompt to write “a Mormon story.” They responded with a surprisingly wide range of realistic and fantastic tales. Many are human reactions to unexpected steps on the path: a lifetime of faith in a patriarchal blessing’s unfulfilled promise, a survivor of violence calling a divided community to repentance, a baptism gone very wrong, and spiritual gifts that extend far beyond the apostle Paul’s list. The characters stretch from wayward bishops and helpful home teachers to cyber-­Seventies searching for lost sheep in the metaverse, with settings from the slums of Mumbai to a heaven that turns out to be more difficult than expected. Some characters reject the path’s restrictions and expectations, while others can second the reported words of J. Golden Kimball, “I may not always walk the straight and narrow, but I sure in hell try to cross it as often as I can.”

edited by Andrew Hall and Robert Raleigh

Signature Books
fiction
paperback: $21.95 | ebook: $9.99 | 305pp

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In Mormonism we are sometimes seemingly casual about death: it’s a veil or a mission call to the spirit world. But our actual encounters with the reality of death inevitably change us in ways that are difficult to articulate.

In this collection, Mormon writers wrestle with mortality and its aftermath. A family sings a hesitant rendition of Happy Birthday to a grief-stricken mother who buried who toddler just a few hours earlier; an agnostic son decides he’s Mormon enough to arrange a funeral for his believing father.

Some essays use death as a means to understand faith. One author imagines a world where Heavenly Mother visits her children in the form of their female ancestors, appearing to her descendants in times of grief or pain.

Others address practicalities: how do you protect your children from death while still allowing them to experience the world; how do you get through one more nausea-ridden day of cancer treatment?

Still others delve into death’s questions: does the overwhelming suffering that occurs in the animal kingdom have a function in the “plan of happiness”?

Sometimes humorous, sometimes heartbreaking, always thought-provoking, these personal essays, poems, and stories may never be heard at a Mormon funeral. But they probably should be.

Moth & Rust: Mormon Encounters with Death (contributor)
Paperback | Documentary
255 pp. | $20.35
978-1560852650

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Winner of Best Anthology, Association for Mormon Letters