Why did she pack up her car and move cross-country? Drop out of college and return to her hometown? Perhaps she was seized by inspiration, had a Joycean epiphany, was impassioned with love or idealistic zeal. As Cicero wrote, "What moves of itself is eternal, who can deny that this is the nature of spirits?" In Something Came Over Me, Eva Murray shares ten stories about women in transition and explores what moves them. Crystal follows her husband all over the world as he harvests organs in disaster sites; and Peg drives the back roads of her haunted memories in Amish Michigan, chasing the very daemon that chases her. In "Freelancing in the Land of Gentry," Maureen gets paid to date and write about it--and she's so hungry for cash, she prays he picks up the check. And in "Aftershock," an Afghani soldier risks his life for his adopted America by translating Taliban documents in his war-torn homeland. He throws a lifeline across the globe to his former teacher, who navigates the puerile privileged in San Francisco. Murray's stories render the human heart resilient, surprising; the human character, tender and vast. "Eva Murray is a rare talent. She has an extraordinary ear for language, and with her gorgeous prose that moves beautifully, reminiscent of Edna O'Brien, her fiction has much to offer readers." Karen Regen-Tuero, Glimmer Train author
About the Author: Eva Murray's stories, "Freelancing in the Land of Gentry" appeared in Tryst in 2009; "Cualquiera," in The Rambler, 2005; and "Warm Hands," Grub Street, 1995. Her feature-length script, Under the Burqa, was a quarter-finalist in Chicago's Cinestory competition in 1999, and her story "Come Get Your Elk," a semi-finalist in the William Faulkner/ Pirate's Alley Fiction Competition in 1994. She is also the author of the novel, The Odyssey of Izzy. "Low Res," the first chapter of novel, was a finalist in Barrelhouse Magazine's "Office Life" short fiction contest in 2009. In 2006, Eva Murray spoke on public radio station KALW-X in the San Francisco Bay Area about the renters' lifestyle and her non-fiction work, We Rent: In San Francisco. She has also published articles about such artists as B.B. King, Stephane Grappelli, Etta James, Bobby McFerrin, Buckwheat Zydeco, the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, and Kent Bellows. Eva lives in San Jose, California, and earned her MFA in Fiction Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. She is a native of Nebraska in the United States. Watch her YouTube interview with Charlie Burton, the inspiration for Ray Z. Omaha in the novel: http: //youtu.be/1edwaRI-Izs