Release date: March 16, 2021
From Delphinium Books
Praise for The Opposite of Chance
When we hearken to the wisdom of our literary ancestors, we get a novel like The Opposite of Chance, and an author like Margaret Hermes, a virtuoso writer navigating the only path that leads to genuine empathy, by embracing multitudes. Bold and brave, Hermes accepts no boundaries on the imagination.
—BOB SHACOCHIS, National Book Award-winning author of Easy in the Islands and Swimming in the Volcano
This quick-and-clever Hermes has wings on her prose and a god’s eye view, compassionate and wise, of the human comedy. Her plucky heroine’s European journey is replete with excursions into the lives of her fellow travelers, taking us along on a novelistic grand tour de finesse.
—JASON SOMMER, Whiting Award-winning author of The Laughter of Adam and Eve and The Man Who Sleeps in My Office
In the artfully picaresque The Opposite of Chance, Margaret Hermes writes, as she always does, with humor and wisdom about women and men and love and sex. And she shines light on those of us who are defined, at least in part, by what we don’t know or understand.
MARY TROY, winner of the USA Book Award for Beauties and a Nelson Algren Prize winner.
Also available:
From Blair/Carolina Wren Press: Relative Strangers, a collection of stories by Hermes, winner of the 2011 Doris Bakwin Book Award.
Additional published works by Margaret Hermes include a mystery novel, The Phoenix Nest, issued in German as Das Phönix Nest, as well as essays and short stories for numerous journals, including:
Art Times
Confrontation
Delmar
Evening Street Review
Fiction International
New Millenium
Owen Wister Review
Passages North
Pembroke Magazine
Peninsula Pulse
Phoebe
Red Cedar Review
River Styx
Rockhurst Review
St. Louis Weekly
Sou’wester
Statement Magazine
Talking River Review
The Green Hills Literary Lantern
The Laurel Review
The Licking River Review
The Literary Review
The Madison Review
The Missouri Review
Thema
The Secret Alameda
The South Carolina Review
The Wisconsin Review
Under the Sun
Women’s Words
Writers’ Forum
Her work has been anthologized in 20 Over 40 (University Press of Mississippi) Exposures: Personal Essays (Woods Colt Press), and Under the Arch (Antares Press).
“Sorting” won first place in “The Write Stuff” short story competition. Margaret Hermes has been a finalist in other writing contests, including the Glimmer Train Very Short Fiction Contest, the River Styx Schlafly Beer MicroFiction contest, and the Passages North Neutrino Short-short Contest and a semi-finalist in the River Styx Schlafly Beer MicroFiction contest and the Quarterly West Novella Competition, as well as receiving Honorable Mention in Glimmer Train’s Very Short Fiction contest and The Hal Prize.
Her stage adaptation – book and lyrics – of an Oscar Wilde fable, “The Birthday of the Infanta,” was commissioned and performed by Metro Theatre Company.