Excerpt from The Blizzard Party by Jack Livings, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

We absorb our parents' grief whether that grief is spoken or not.

The workmen across the street have finished their breakfasts and gone inside the building. They begin work at 8:00 a.m. Soon they will be on the roof, where they've been banging on the HVAC units all week. They will have the best view in the city, but there will be no gifs of the incident passed around social. No conspiracy theories will coalesce around mismatched metadata from one of their phones, somehow calibrated incorrectly, out of sync with central internet time, an outlier, a time traveler, a visitor from another dimension. They will deliver no eyewitness accounts to brisk reporters with sharply parted hair. No helicopters will arrive to provide the bird's-eye view. No wailing fire engines at the curb. No one will claim to have seen black-suited men fleeing the building. But there will be reverberations. One of the workmen might inexplicably return to the religion of his childhood. One might begin a study of geology. Another might quit the trades and move to Jamaica. They will not know it, but they will bear witness to my act of genesis.

Excerpted from The Blizzard Party by Jack Livings. Copyright © 2021 by Jack Livings. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.