“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.”

“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.”

“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.”