“Our desires are as big as a mountain. So are our obstacles.”
When Jennie falls in love with Luke, a scandal ensues and they leave town to start a new life. They believe in a promising future.
But their happiness is interrupted by a spying stranger, who fears the law, and by the demands of their growing children, Riley and Spencer, who have their own dreams and secrets.
Will the past repeat itself? Or are new beginnings truly possible?
Move the Mountain is a multi-generational story of faith and desire, about an earlier America that was not innocent, but full of hope.
Notices
“Charles Holdefer is an alchemist, transforming our national and human shortcomings into satiric gold.”
—Elizabeth McKenzie, author of The Portable Veblen
“Charles Holdefer’s Move the Mountain is a stark portrait of middle America in the mid-twentieth century, where people are alienated from their lives, and never far from mockery or menace. Yet they’re also full of dreams and longing, and cluelessly, with admirable stubbornness, they stagger toward possibility.”
—Diana Goetsch, author of This Body I Wore
Charles Holdefer grew up in Iowa and is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Sorbonne. He currently teaches at the University of Poitiers, France.
His short fiction has appeared in many magazines, including the New England Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, North American Review, Los Angeles Review, Slice and Yellow Silk. His story “The Raptor” won a Pushcart Prize.
He also writes essays and reviews which have appeared in The Antioch Review, World Literature Today, New England Review, The Dactyl Review, The Collagist, l’Oeil du Spectateur, New York Journal of Books, Journal of the Short Story in English and elsewhere.