{ "item_title" : "Fragmented Coordinates", "item_author" : [" The Pelican Atelier", "Margaret Kessler "], "item_description" : "Five people in one Ohio town. Three weeks in February. None of them ever finds out. Ashford Mills has a data campus on its east edge and a diner on the corner of Hoyt and Third. On the twelfth, a mechanic leaves a bypass valve open a third of a turn. Eight cabinets run four degrees warm. Nine days later a road-closure feed falls ninety minutes behind, and a delivery driver is sent up a road that has been closed since Tuesday. At 10:47 that night the power goes out across the county. At 11:51, five people are sitting in the same dark diner. One of them caused part of it. One of them watched it happen on a screen and coded it under policy 4.2c. One of them decided, correctly and in writing, not to escalate. None of them will ever learn what the others did. Six stories. Six voices. One night. Fragmented Coordinates is a short literary novel told in six linked stories, each in a different voice. Arthur has run the same counter since 1994 and speaks in short flat sentences. Mateo hears two syllables inside a cooling plant and cannot decide whether they are there. Julian thinks in thresholds and percentiles and writes down exactly why he did not raise the alarm. Leo does the arithmetic on a delivery that pays eleven dollars. Elena watches four minutes and eleven seconds of a windshield and clicks publish. The prose changes when the person changes. A convergence, not a revelation. The causal chain runs cleanly from a valve to a barrier to a table in a dark room. Every character holds one link. No character holds two. The reader is the only one who ever sees the whole of it, and nobody in the book is told. For readers who like their fiction quiet, cold, procedural, and unresolved - interconnected lives in a small American town, ordinary work rendered exactly, and an ending that refuses to explain itself. Approximately 35,000 words. A novella-length literary novel in six parts.", "item_img_path" : "https://covers2.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/9/79/819/108/9798191087245_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "14.99", "online_price" : "14.99", "our_price" : "14.99", "club_price" : "14.99", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "" } }

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