Side by Side but Never Face to Face

a novella and stories by Maggie Kast

Side By Side front cover.final.jpg

Side by Side but Never Face to Face asks, Can new love be found in old age? Greta has been wrenched from a long and tightly-circled marriage to Manfred, an Austrian Holocaust survivor. Together they mourned the accidental death of a daughter and experienced a widening of spiritual horizons as they grieved. Shifting between Chicago, Austria, and rural Wisconsin, the present and decades past, these linked narratives unfold the story of Greta—daughter, wife, mother, widow, survivor, and seeker—with profound insight into the emotional conflicts, spiritual yearnings, and everyday experiences that link us to others of every time and place.

For review of the book in The Colorado Review by Elizabeth Boyle, see https://coloradoreview.colostate.edu/reviews/side-by-side-but-never-face-to-face/

 

It’s more important now than ever to support your local independent bookstore. Please pre-order from one of the fine stores where I’ll be reading and signing, often in conversation with interesting colleagues.

 
Maggie Kast has a gift for illuminating her characters’ inner lives, and these beautiful stories, as they shuttle gracefully between past and present, Europe and America, strike a profound and satisfying balance between intimacy and mystery. . .a wise and powerful book about marriage and parenthood, about survival and transformation.
— Garth Greenwell, author of Cleanness and What Belongs to You
From the joy of ‘Joyful Noise’ to the tense marital ambiguities of ‘Side by Side but Never Face to Face,’ these fictions speak to each other across generations, ethnicities, and religious beliefs. Maggie Kast has assembled a resilient and vivid group of characters from the Austro-Hungarian Empire to the Hmong of Door County, Wisconsin. Connecting all these is the story of Greta, who, attached to the others by heritage or circumstance or love, seeks to understand herself and the ineffable. A gripping and richly thoughtful collection.
— Janet Burroway, author of Writing Fiction and Raw Silk
Maggie Kast’s Side by Side but Never Face to Face is a fascinating and unusual collection. Her fiction is what we might call adjacent to fact – convincing and complex stories spun from but not intended to be autobiography. They combine family and marital history, spiritual longing, profound questioning of boundaries between cultures and, finally, via a beautifully evoked passionate encounter, a reassuring bringing-together of body and soul.
— Rosellen Brown, author of The Lake on Fire and Before and After