Anne Sanow’s first book of stories, Triple Time, winner of the 2009 Drue Heinz Literature Prize, has recently been awarded this year’s L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award for Fiction. The magnificent collection deserves all the acclaim it’s been getting. Story after story, you’ll likely be astounded by the graceful precision of the author’s descriptions, the subtleties of communication among lovers and kin quietly negotiating their ways through very private pressures, all amid a remarkably vivid landscape. For Dossier’s third issue, she kindly allowed us to publish her story, Slow Stately Dance In Triple Time, and now we’re making it available online. Set in Saudi Arabia post-WWII, it may prove to be one of the more mesmerizing love stories you’ll have gotten your hands on.

Here’s what Dorothy Allison has to say about Sanow’s work: “Gorgeous and subtle, Anne Sanow’s Triple Time are stories that stay with you. Her characters are stripped down to the essential grit, surviving through patience and the ability to gauge complex layers of tradition and expectation. Progress is the mantra, but this is progress shaped by the strictures of tradition. Foreigners, Saudi natives, expats and Bedouins—all misunderstand each other to one degree or another. Love destroys, family redeems, and the sand shifts through closed doors as easily as open ones, especially on the top floors of a high-rise apartment. Loss is the base note, but also a patina that softens experience—proof of what should be treasured.”

Read Slow Stately Dance in Triple Time here.

Slow Stately Dance in Triple Time is from _Triple Time_, by Anne Sanow, © 2009. Posted by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.