Tourist Season: Stories

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.



[When reading Enid Shomer's stories,] the thing one quickly senses is the will and the voice, someone saying, in effect, 'Relax, be comfortable, I'm going to take good care of you.' These are very fine stories.”

-James Salter, in Imaginary Men



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

Enid Shomer's stories and poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The Atlantic Monthly, among other publications. She is the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Florida Arts Council, and her debut collection, Imaginary Men, won the Iowa Short Fiction Award and the LSU/Southern Review award. Two of these stories were selected for New Stories from the South: The Year's Best. Shomer lives in Tampa, Florida.

About Enid Shomer