Sept. 2007 City Weekly Arty Award
Long After Dark won an Arty Award from Salt Lake City Weekly. It was for best book of LDS fiction. I have to say that getting that award from them is a complete and utter surprise, but really fantastic as well since City Weekly is kind of the opposite of a traditional LDS venue. Thanks to my people on the fringe.
Nov. 2006 The book is finally out.
It's one of the first offerings from a new press called Zarahemla Books. It's been a very pleasant experience working with the editor, Chris Bigelow. I think he has a good chance of making a difference, and I'm flattered that he was interested in the project.
Long After Dark
Stories and a novella
by Todd Robert Petersen
Price: $14.95
Pages: 164
ISBN-10: 0-9787971-0-8
ISBN-13: 978-0-9787971-0-2
Available from Zarahemla Books
Description
A man struggles--literally--with his dead father. A housewife suffers from post-calling depression. The son of a polygamist comes to terms with his upbringing. An unwed teen mother faces her father. In these award-winning stories and a new novella, Todd Robert Petersen takes the reader on expeditions to Utah, Arizona, Brazil, Rwanda, and into the souls of twenty-first-century Mormons caught between their humanity, faith, and church.
Some blurbs
Long After Dark sets a new standard for Mormon literature. Its language is pitch-perfect, its insight often shattering. From rural Utah to Rwanda, Petersen's characters reveal the human and the spiritual to be inevitably fused. A world-wise, honest, and compassionate book.
Heidi Hart, author of Grace Notes: The Waking of a Woman's Voice
It has become increasingly clear to me that no assessment of the American West which fails to take Mormon culture into serious account can be considered entirely complete. Long After Dark is as revealing a glimpse into this community as we could wish for. With sentences painstaking and diligent, Todd Robert Petersen portrays characters struggling for and against their respective communities--he tells stories of a West which few non-Mormons have heard, but the stories are, nevertheless, our own.
Aaron Gwyn, author of Dog on the Cross
Todd Robert Petersen represents a new breed of Mormon writer, creatively and sympathetically examining his faith through a series of probing, appealingly written short stories. His Mormon magic realism, his fully-rounded characters, and his appealing protagonists torn between church beliefs and humane actions make this collection of stories an especially attractive work.
Richard Etulain, author of Reimagining the Modern American West: A Century of Fiction, History, and Art
Petersen's stories never resolve, yet, because of the Mormon universe they are portraying, they seem guardedly optimistic?in a way that indicates that nothing is over, fixed, done for, done with; that everything is still solvable, in flux. He seems, somehow, to imply a faithful universe even if his characters are mired in mortality. I think it is a wonderful book! It's a triumph for Mormon literature: Mormonism with neither sneer nor message.
Richard H. Cracroft, professor emeritus, BYU