​​Peter Never Came
​(Winner of the Autumn House Press Fiction Prize)
The characters in Ashley Cowger's short stories learn to accept the fear, the regret, and the beauty of growing up in a world where Peter Pan will never come. The lives portrayed here are firmly planted in reality, a place where dreams loom only as hope on a faraway horizon. In Shades of Blue, an entire town mourns the death of a six-year-old boy, not knowing what a rotten human being he would have grown up to become; Pan and Pirates shows us two brothers attempting to summon a demon pirate out of a mirror. Wishing on Airplanes takes us into the mind of an aging college professor who longs for the kind of love he reads about in classical poetry; and in Nature, a woman copes with the strength and anger she only just discovered she carries.