Winner of Prize Americana, Curiosity Killed the Sphinx and Other Stories is a collection of short fiction exploring the complexities of life.  Laying the profound beside the mundane, author Katherine L. Holmes creates rich and complicated characters who search for identity, meaning, and purpose within a world often dangerous and sometimes even cruel.  Her readers relate to such struggles and find comfort as they face similar challenges of the own. A couple clashing with early computers, a divorced woman finding her scattered family to be strangers, a girl running away to the shop where her parents’ antiques were sold, Midwestern college students in weather and water emergencies – these are some of the conflicts examined by the author. Past solutions tempt these characters as they consider contemporary choices.

Curiosity Killed the Sphinx and Other Stories was released May 21, 2012 by Press Americana's fiction imprint Hollywood Books International.  Press Americana is part of Americana:  An Institute for American Studies and Creative Writing.   They also publish Magazine Americana: The American Popular Culture Magazine, Americana:  The Journal of American Popular Culture, and Review Americana:  A Creative Writing Journal.

Available at Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble in paperback, Kindle, and ebook.

"'Curiosity Killed the Sphinx' is a fine collection that gives readers much to think about." - The Midwest Book Review

"The stories aren’t ghost stories, but there’s an eerie coolness in Holmes’s work, so that even stories about a family cookout or an unemployed woman making a quilt feel haunted. Holmes is a native of Minnesota and the Midwest figures heavily in her work, but Holmes’s Midwest isn’t a place of robust sunshine and casseroles: it is a place of attics and flowers fraught with meaning. In every story, there is something lurking just beyond the edges of eyesight."   -  E. D. Watson for Front Porch Journal

From an interview with Shannon Yarbrough at the LL Book Review, July 18, 2012

"I wanted to portray Midwestern life as I knew it. The Midwest has undergone many changes while I’ve lived in Minnesota all my life. Often I wrote a short story for answers since life has been a puzzle. Sometimes the direction that I didn’t take sparked my imagination."

"Holmes likes to use language vividly and originally ... [She] also uses patterns of imagery to convey her themes. In one of my favourite stories, 'Nuts and Bolts', a childfree couple choose not to spend a holiday with friends ..." - Ruth Latta, The Compulsive Reader

"It's great enough to read again and again. I originally borrowed from a friend." - Michael J., Goodreads

 Sneak Peak from Indies Unlimited

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