The Impossible Shore

A Story Cycle

by Marc Porter Zasada

Named one of the Best 100 Indie Books of 2021 by Kirkus Reviews!

“Grand visions…the stories are capacious and sweeping…pitch-perfect…
Zasada’s yarns captivate.”—Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)

“…closely linked short stories that form a whole far greater than the sum of their parts. Each layer of The Impossible Shore draws the reader deeper than the one before. An extraordinary, intricately crafted work of literature, The Impossible Shore is highly recommended.”—Midwest Book Review

“The writing is hypnotic and the stories transporting! Reach for The Impossible Shore: A Story Cycle by NPR alum Marc Porter Zasada“–Adrienne Sparks, Reach for a Book With Adrienne” on Instagram

Listen to the Interview with Vicki St. Clair on KKNW in Seattle. “We all have this sense of greatness just out of reach…”

Now available from Upper Story Press as Paperback & Kindle eBook on Amazon.com.

In this Story Cycle of fourteen closely linked and exquisitely wrought tales, entire systems of thought arise and fall with the characters. A man in Central Park envisions a daunting, snow-capped mountain rising up in place of The Dakota. A rock star dreams of heaven and hell. A minor Pakistani official tries to imagine The West. An unprepared heir explores the deepest possibilities of “more.” A CFO at a financial firm tries to pass his fortune to a sailor. A college professor speaks with the dead. Lovers move first into, and then out of worlds they create together.

As we move closer to The Impossible Shore, the unreachable comes almost within our grasp.

The song “Stop Asking” by Josh Silvera was based on The Productions of Time, one of the key works in the cycle, and will be released November, 2023.

Press Contact: David Carriere, david@davidcarriere.org Download Press Releas e

About the Author: Marc Porter Zasada is perhaps best known for his six years of “Urban Man” commentaries on NPR station KCRW in Los Angeles, but he has had many careers: newspaper editor, book editor, theatre and classical music reviewer, essayist, and high-tech marketing executive at leading global companies. His articles and stories have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, the Antioch Review, The Florida Review, Big Fiction, and many other venues. Marc was one of seven founding members of the Bay Area Book Awards. He now makes his home in Southern California. This is his first full-length work of fiction.

THE IMPOSSIBLE SHORE: A Story Cycle

by Marc Porter-Zasada

Published by Upper Story Press

Distributed by Kindle Direct Publishing

Cover & Interior Design by Rafael Andres

$14.00; Paperback ISBN: 978-0-578-88585-8

$5.00; Kindle eBook

255 Pages

Publication Date: June 15, 2021

From the Prologue:

We like to think of each moment in our lives as a kind of birth canal, taking us kicking and screaming from the past into the future.

But it’s not true.

We do not leave the past to move into the future. It’s more like past and future stand ever side by side, fighting and embracing like lovers. We are the child caught unhappily between, siding sometimes with the one parent, and sometimes with the other. Torn as they pull us back and forth with terrifying violence, moment to moment, hour to hour.

The future, of course, seeks total victory. It attacks all previous assumptions, all stated reasons, and everything it considers childhood—which covers pretty much everything we have ever done.

Although its victory is never assured, the future does, of course, usually win. That’s because the past suffers from an enormous burden. No matter how much it fears the future, chastises the future, or tries to bully the future—the past knows that the future represents the very purpose of its own existence. The past knows it must ever try to seduce, and even to love the future; while the future knows it need never try to love the past at all.

Day by day, century by century, the past cries out to the future: “Do not set aside my beauty, my desires, and my carefully-constructed truths, even as you try to take my precious child to some impossible shore.”