"An elderly woman visits an art gallery with a much younger friend, and is stopped short by an abstract painting which once hung over the bed of a distant and long-dead lover. In his dying moments, an old man's eyes come to rest on the record player he bought in 1958, bringing back memories of a time its ownership opened up a world of artistic, cultural and romantic possibilities which would not have happened otherwise. A young girl in the southern United States from an evangelical family spends an endless night listening to Orson Welles's broadcast of the War of the Worlds on the front porch, waiting for the world to end. The stories of Alice Petersen's new collection of stories attach themselves to very small material things--the worldly goods of the title--which we carry along with us as we pass through life, in some cases only recognizing the significance of them much later, after living with them for years in a way that made them almost invisible. These things--often connected in some way to music or art, whether they are record players or radios or musical instruments or paintings--develop a totemic aspect in the lives of Petersen's characters, and of her stories. But it is the artful music of her writing, and her deep understanding of human motivation and emotion and the fragility of personal relations, that are Alice Petersen's real strengths, and which make Worldly Goods itself such an essential work of art."--From publisher.

Short stories.