Their binding commitment to self-seriousness and minimal irony, handled well, can accomplish moving stories grounded in psychological frankness, vulnerability and compassion.
Stories grounded in the landscape also loom large, in customs such as choosing the gleaning queen when the harvest is brought in, or bumping heads against boundary stones to affirm the limits of the local world.
"Traffic," in contrast, is an ensemble piece, a dense weave of stories grounded not in a character but in a charged, topical theme -- the drug war, seen from all sides of the battlefield.
The final story, "Ground Zero," is told by a psychiatrist who becomes as unsettled as her patient.
The Washington Post stated that "the plot doesn't exactly break new crime-story ground.
The two-story ground level gallery was added next to the east wall of the original building for display of architectural and sculptural casts.
McKean weaves his distinctive artistry into a story grounded in grief, regret and reunion – a semi-animated drama with imagination to spare.
In "The Man in the Woods" she has created a story grounded in mythology, told like a fairy tale, with her typical hanging ending, though in this case the clues suggest pretty clearly how it will end.
Her Fearful Symmetry, the long-awaited follow-up, is in many ways a conventional ghost story, grounded in one of the most elemental human desires: the wish to communicate with those we love after death.
The Marriage of Opposites by Alice Hoffman Alice Hoffman's The Marriage of Opposites is an epic love story grounded in history.
