Tourist Season: Stories
(Random House, March 2007)

In Tourist Season, award-winning author Enid Shomer offers ten brilliant, richly detailed unforgettable stories of resilient women, aged seventeen to seventy, each at a pivotal point in her life. Their journeys cross distances of place and mind: A middle-aged Floridian who learns that she is the reincarnation of a Buddhist saint takes daring steps on her path to enlightenment; a long-buried secret forces one woman to leave the daughter she deeply loves; a Radcliffe student faces shocking family truths and taboos during the summer of 1966; an unexpected kinship forms between two women who land in a county jail after an excursion to Las Vegas. These travelers wander through shifting emotional landscapes of love, sex, and relationships, and often miss the destinations they’d wished to reach–of insight, connection, and understanding. Whether journeying to new geographical locales or exploring uncharted personal terrain, Tourist Season offers a provocative, engaging, and often humorous road map of the heart and soul.


Beautifully made, surprising and inevitable, wonderfully inventive and deeply true, these stories are full of small, irreverent, straight-faced miracles. They will lead women of all ages to suspect that the best may be yet to come.

—Pam Houston, author of Cowboys Are My Weakness and Sight Hound

Selected Works

Novel
The Twelve Rooms of the Nile
To be published in 2012 by Simon and Schuster both in the U.S. and in the U.K.
Short Fiction
Tourist Season
"Beautifully made, surprising and inevitable, wonderfully inventive and deeply true"
—Pam Houston
Imaginary Men
"Remarkable insights into tradition and family, love and sex... This is a splendid fictional debut."
—Robert Olen Butler
Poetry; Biography
STARS AT NOON: Poems from the Life of Jacqueline Cochran
Poems that give voice to the mercurial, dazzling woman who first broke the sound barrier.
Poetry
Black Drum
A stunning collection that adroitly mixes the sacred and the profane, the classical and casual.
—Booklist
This Close to the Earth
Moving through the cycle of birth, growth, and death, the poems of Enid Shomer are informed by physical knowledge, transforming it into rare and often startling insight.
Stalking the Florida Panther
"In this fine first book the eternal themes of love, loss, unrequital, and forgiveness come together with the characters to form a remarkably unified whole."
—Maxine Kumin