Winner of the Gold Medal
for the Short Story
from the Independent Publishers' Association
and Forward Magazine

A successful artist is expected to give his or her all for “the work.”  The linked stories in The Grass Labyrinth challenge the reader to determine if the work is worth the pain often visited on those who share an artist’s life. A married children’s book illustrator falls in love with a Photorealist refugee. Their daughter, a blocked poet, becomes infatuated with a young painter with whom she shares a palpable bond. And this young painter, dumped by his girlfriend and tired of the hustle, envisions settling down with his widowed stepmother in the house where he grew up. Whether in a college town in Pennsylvania, a loft in Brooklyn, or a ramshackle cottage on the Carolina coast, these stories explore, over a thirty-year span, how the choices the characters make shape those they love in ways they never anticipate, down through the generations. By turns ironic, hopeful, and wry, Charlotte Holmes paints a surprising portrait of one family’s intimate struggle to find the paths that will carry them to the work they want to do, the lives they want to lead, and the people they can’t help but love.

Mary Cappello:

I can’t remember the last time I felt so much in the presence of poetry while reading a collection of short stories. In The Grass Labyrinth, ways of making art (aesthetics) run up against modes of relatedness (the art of living); minor art takes a character through periods of major challenges or life-altering events; and major art emerges amid the quietness of simple acts. Here is a book to return to again and again for its delicacy of insight, its purity of tempo, its immeasurable heart.

David Huddle:

Charlotte Holmes is the magician of moment-making.  Out of plain words, she can make a scene look and feel so real a reader has the sense of living it--and of remembering it later as lived experience.  The Grass Labyrinth is moving and unforgettable.

Cary Holladay:

In the tradition of Chekhov, Charlotte Holmes lays bare the destructive passions that upend the lives of a charismatic painter, his wives, lovers, and children. The interwoven stories probe their ungovernable hearts, revealing secrets and betrayals that ring through generations. Shimmering and evocative, The Grass Labyrinth is a contemporary classic.


Ito Romo:

The sprigs of grass in Charlotte Holmes’ The Grass Labyrinth break slowly through the snow covered grounds of the book’s pages, fertile with love and loss. In the end, we find ourselves walking through a Borgesian garden of both infinite pain and infinite beauty.