“An excellent book … a book that will stir your heart and mind and make you want to live fully in the moment every second of your life.”
~ W. Martin
“I spent part of last weekend reading your book on my computer. I think it will become a classic…a book such as yours that is nearly perfect as is.” ~Karyl Mehlman
“I cried throughout it was so beautifully written. And joyful.” ~Carolyn Krauser
Some people change every room they walk into. Cory Hastings changes every life. Born with a condition that makes him age ten times faster physically and mentally, in ways most people never have to reckon with, he moves through the world with a quality of attention that draws people toward him and holds them there.
A Boy Called Swift is the story of what happens when an extraordinary life meets a woman brave enough to choose it, and a community of people who discover, in his orbit, what they were always capable of being.
“Every second is a lifetime if you’re paying attention.” — Cory Hastings
A Boy Called Swift is available August 1 but you can PRE-ORDER your copy today at a discounted price of $2.99 (regular price will be $5.99).
https://a.co/d/0csH89Tq
Note: It will also be available in paperback and deluxe hardcover on August 1.
EXCERPT:
He met Elaine on the fourth day. He had been in the university library, a high-ceilinged Victorian building that smelled of old paper and radiator heat and the particular institutional quiet of a place where thinking is the primary activity, working at one of the long oak tables near the tall windows, when someone sat down across from him with the purposeful energy of a person who has identified a chair and intends to use it and is not particularly interested in who is already at the table.
She had dark hair, cut to her shoulders, and she was carrying four books and a coffee that was technically not allowed in the library, and a bag over one shoulder that appeared to contain approximately everything she owned.
She dropped the bag, stacked the books, pulled out a battered notebook, uncapped a pen, and began writing without looking up. All of this took perhaps thirty seconds. Then she looked up. She looked at Cory. She looked back at her notebook. Then she looked up again.
“You’re him,” she said; not starstruck, she was not a person who did starstruck, but interested, the way she was interested in everything, with her whole face.
“I’m Cory,” he said.
“I know who you are. I’m Elaine. I’m doing my PhD in literature. I’m supposed to be writing about Milton right now.” She looked at his work spread across the table. “Is that topology?”
“Algebraic topology, yes.”
“Hm.” She uncapped her pen again. “I don’t know what that is, but it looks serious.”
“Milton is serious, too.”
She looked at him over the top of her notebook with dark eyes that were quick, assessing, and faintly amused. “Yes,” she said, “but Milton has been dead for three hundred and fifty years, and he can wait. Topology is presumably more urgent.”
Cory considered this. “Actually, topology is largely concerned with properties that are preserved through continuous deformation. Urgency is not a factor.”
Elaine stared at him for a moment, then laughed: the full laugh, loud enough that the student two tables over looked up with irritation, which she did not notice or did not care about, which Cory was already understanding was the same thing where she was concerned. “All right,” she said. “I like you. Don’t make it weird.” And that was that.
What followed, over the next three weeks, was a friendship that arrived fully formed and immediately comfortable, the way certain friendships do when two people have the good fortune to find each other before either of them has worked out the proper way to be cautious. Elaine moved through the world at a velocity that Cory found both familiar and entirely new, new because hers was emotional and social and comic rather than intellectual, though it was that too. She had opinions; many opinions, on many subjects, delivered with the cheerful force of someone who enjoys being disagreed with because that was also interesting. She could argue for a position she didn’t hold just to see where the argument went. She could change her mind completely in the middle of a conversation and announce the change without embarrassment. She laughed at things that surprised her and was surprised by things that other people found ordinary, and found ordinary things that other people found surprising. She was, in the most specific sense of the word, alive: fully, noisily, unapologetically alive.
Cory, who had been thinking about the nature of aliveness since he was old enough to understand his own situation, found this remarkable in a way he could not immediately articulate. He filed it away and continued to find it remarkable and said nothing about it. They fell into a daily habit without discussing it: library in the mornings, his table, her coffee that was not allowed in the library; lunch in the refectory, where she ate quickly and talked continuously, and he ate methodically and listened with his full attention, which she noticed and did not comment on, but which affected her in ways she would not admit for several weeks.
The literature seminar was her idea. Of course, it was her idea. She had been attending a graduate seminar on the Romantics, run by a professor named Whitmore who had strong opinions about who belonged in his seminar room and had made those opinions clear at the first session: graduate students in literature only, no auditors, no exceptions.
Elaine mentioned to Cory, on a Wednesday afternoon, that they were discussing Keats the following day, specifically the question of what Keats understood about beauty and mortality that other poets hadn’t. Cory was quiet for a moment, then said, “I have thoughts about that.”
Elaine looked at him with the faintly amused expression she wore when something was becoming interesting. “Do you?”
“Keats died at twenty-five. He wrote his best work in the last two years of his life. The compression of time produces a certain density of attention. I find that I have thoughts about that.”
Elaine looked at him for a long moment, then said, “Wear something that doesn’t make you look twelve. Meet me outside Whitmore’s building at two.”
She smuggled him in via the side door during the ten-minute break between seminars, seated him in the back row with her coat over the chair in front to partially obscure him, and returned to her own seat with the focused innocence of someone who is definitely not doing anything. It lasted twenty-five minutes before Professor Whitmore, whose peripheral vision was apparently exceptional, stopped mid-sentence and looked at the back row and said, “Miss Calloway, who is that?” There was a pause.
“A friend,” Elaine said.
“I can see that. What is your friend doing in my seminar?” Another pause.
Cory, in the back row, said pleasantly, “I was interested in the question of whether Keats’s awareness of his own mortality accelerated his artistic development or whether it was coincidental with it. I have a perspective on acceleration that might be relevant.”
The seminar room went very quiet in the way of rooms that have just understood something. Professor Whitmore looked at the back row for a long moment; he was sixty-five years old and had been teaching the Romantics for thirty-five of them, and had, in that time, developed a reliable instinct for when something interesting was about to happen in his seminar room. “All right,” he said slowly. “Let’s hear it.”
What followed was forty-five minutes that three of the graduate students present would later describe as the best seminar they attended in their entire time at Caldwell. Cory spoke about acceleration and artistic production not theoretically but from the inside, with the authority of someone who is living the question rather than studying it, and the room listened with the particular quality of attention that arrives when something real has entered the space.
Professor Whitmore, at the end, looked at Cory over his reading glasses and said, “You may come back.”
In the corridor afterward, Elaine walked very fast for thirty seconds and then stopped and leaned against the wall and laughed until she had to hold onto Cory’s arm to stay upright.
“His face,” she said, when she could speak. “When you started talking. His face.”
Cory was smiling, the real smile, the one that seemed to reach his eyes. “You looked very innocent,” he said. “For about four seconds.”
“I am innocent,” she said, straightening up, pulling her coat on with dignity. “I simply brought a friend to a seminar. The fact that Whitmore doesn’t allow friends is a limitation of his, not mine.”
They were spoken to by the department administrator the following morning. The conversation concluded with an understanding that Cory would be welcome to attend the Romantics seminar as an unofficial auditor, which was precisely what Elaine had intended from the beginning and which she accepted with the gracious surprise of someone who had not been planning this all along.
Cory paid the administrator’s fine for the unauthorized library coffee out of his own pocket, which Elaine discovered two weeks later, and which she was still arguing about years later, which is a different story and a long time from now.
A Boy Called Swift is available August 1 but you can PRE-ORDER your copy today at a discounted price of $2.99 (regular price will be $5.99). https://a.co/d/0csH89Tq
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