Natalie L. M. Petesch

Natalie L. M. Petesch has published ten previous books of fiction, including the Swallow Press titles Duncan’s Colony, Flowering Mimosa, Justina of Andalusia, and The Immigrant Train. She lives in Pittsburgh.

Duncan’s Colony

“During the nineteen sixties, following the missile crisis and during the Vietnam War, communitarian societies began to reappear in the United States. Those who were of an invincibly optimistic nature gathered together in agrarian or utopian communes reminiscent of the nineteenth century.…

Flowering Mimosa

Flowering Mimosa is a story of lost innocence and coming of age among the disinherited of America in the 1980's. Against a backdrop of social and economic disruption in the American southwest, Petesch traces the fates of the Wingfield family, who have lost their Texas farm and moved to a mining town in Silver Valley, Idaho.…

Justina of Andalusia

and Other Stories

This collection of stories is, like Petesch’s previous work, distinguished by its brilliant lyrical intensity and by characters who are stunningly alive. It is a powerful collection about impassioned cultural conflicts in present-day Spain and Mexico; it is also a book about ourselves—how we have failed to love the Earth and have squandered our resources.…

The Immigrant Train

& Other Stories

In this short story collection, acclaimed author Natalie Petesch reaffirms for us our enduring debt to millions of immigrants who helped build America. Inspired by her own parents’ journey at the turn of the century, Petesch spins these tales of immigration in a spare and lyrical prose that assures our involvement: a political fugitive threatened with imprisonment reaches a long-sought mining town in Minnesota; as Polish immigrant Witold Dobrynski realizes his dream of owning a farm in Texas, a spiritual crisis changes his life; fourteen-year-old Stasio Wolski quickly becomes a man in the underworld of a big city but is haunted by the loss of his Polish identity: a beekeeping bachelor's pre-occupation with the social life of the hive is seamlessly interwoven with the colorful tapestry of early twentieth-century Pittsburgh.…

The Confessions of Señora Francesca Navarro and Other Stories

“Memory, of course, is sometimes like a bucking horse, sometimes a runaway one, and one must control the reins until finally it stops, snorting with exhausted relief,” writes Natalie L. M. Petesch in her haunting new collection, The Confessions of Señora Francesca Navarro and Other Stories.…