If literary fiction exists in order to look under the surface of life and tell the truth about what it finds there—then the stories in Eternal Damnation do an extraordinary job.

These stories are quiet and thoughtful, their voices refusing to be made up of the tropes, images, and attitudes usually mistaken for “reality.” Their characters may not see the expected things, but what they do see is clear and real, if cruelly so. A young girl experiences a magical sight and carries it with her for life—a span that then seems but a moment. A boy, in 1957, hears sixty years of history unfolded in one casually-spoken sentence. In “Losses,” a man thinks back to three distant tragedies and fears that the most terrible thing about them may lie in their having no meaning. And stories like “Being Blind,” “The Unspeakable,” “Minutiae,” “Small Potatoes,” and “A Perfect Morning” look unflinchingly at the crimes and surrealisms of the Covid era.

From award-winning novelist Eric Larsen, stories that look under the surface of things, see the terror there—and keep looking.

Born in 1941 in Northfield, Minnesota, Eric Larsen graduated from Carleton College in 1963 and took his doctorate from the University of Iowa in 1970. For over three decades he taught in the English Department at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, retiring in 2006. His debut novel, An American Memory, appeared in 1988, winning the Chicago Tribune’s first Heartland Prize, and was followed by I Am Zoë Handke (1992); The End of the 19th Century (2011); The Decline and Fall of the American Nation (2013); and The Book of Reading (2023), completing a five-part saga of family and nation. Larsen married the late Anne Larsen, editor of Kirkus Reviews, and the couple raised two daughters, Flynn and Gavin, both active and highly productive in the arts. Larsen lives in New York City and is author also of the non-fiction works Homer Whole: A Reading of the Iliad (2009); A Nation Gone Blind: America in an Age of Simplification and Deceit (2006); and The Skull of Yorick: The Emptiness of American Thinking at a Time of Grave Peril—Studies in the cover-up of 9/11 (2011). His website is www.ericlarsen.info.