Bright Angels and Familiars anthologizes the full sweep of contemporary Mormon short fiction. Beginning with Virginia Sorensen and Maurine Whipple, the best of Mormondom’s “lost generation” of the 1940s and 1950s, it progresses to Douglas Thayer and Donald Marshall, the first in a new generation of the 1970s and 1980s to produce complete collections of short stories, and Lewis Horne and Levi Peterson, the first to be nationally published and honored. It concludes with such recent and increasingly prominent writers as Phyllis Barber, John Bennion, Orson Scott Card, Neal Chandler, Judith Freeman, Walter Kirn, and Margaret Young.

These writers employ a wide spectrum of styles and themes, from realism to post-modernism, from folklore to satire, from faith to despair. Editor Eugene England has selected what he feels are the best short stories of today’s finest Mormon writers, making Bright Angels and Familiars a definitive compilation.

“Like all good fictions, the best of these stories transcend the rubric under which they are collected—they are, finally, neither contemporary nor Mormon, but simply narratives of that American West which is ultimately not so much a place as a rhetoric, a particular way of talking about the human experience. Good things do come out of Utah, and this book is one of them.” —François Camoin, Professor of English, University of Utah; author, Like Love, But Not Exactly

“This timely collection of well-crafted short stories from the edges of Mormon society enables a variety of glimpses into contemporary Mormon life and celebrates the confluence of cutting-edge Mormon fiction with the mainstream of secular American letters.” —Richard Cracroft, Professor of English, Brigham Young University; co-editor, A Believing People and Twenty-two Young Mormon Writers

“Bright Angels and Familiars is baptism by immersion in Mormon literary waters, a shining collection of distinctive voices. Eugene England’s even-handed and informed introduction illuminates the ‘New Mormon Fiction.’” —William Mulder, Professor of English Emeritus, University of Utah; co-editor, Among the Mormons

about the editor

Eugene England, Professor of English literature at Brigham Young University, is co-editor of Harvest: Contemporary Mormon Poems and author of The Quality of Mercy: Personal Essays on Mormon Experience.

title page

Bright Angels and Familiars
Contemporary Mormon Stories

Eugene England, Editor

Signature Books
Salt Lake City
1992

dedication page

for Virginia Sorensen, 1912-91, and
Maurine Whipple, 1903-92.
They Taught us how.

copyright page

Cover design by Larry Clarkson.
Cover illustration by Brian Kershisnik.
Interior design by Brent Corcoran.

© 1992 by Signature Books, Inc. All rights reserved.
Signature Books is a registered trademark of Signature Books, Inc.
Composed and printed in the United States of America.
∞ Printed on acid-free paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bright angels and familiars : contemporary Mormon stories / edited by Eugene England.

1. Short stories, American—Mormon authors. 2. Mormons—Fiction. I. England, Eugene.

Ps591.M6B75 1992 813'.010892283—dc20 92-16705 CIP
ISBN: 1-56085-026-4