Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Jun 2016
224 pages
Genre: Short Stories
Publication Information
"This is an extraordinary book of stories. Many of the characters are anchored to coastal Maine, but a particular quality of wildness animates nearly all of them. The stories are energetic, often mysterious, and beautifully written, and they will stay in your memory long after you finish the book." - Charles Baxter
Moving along the Maine Coast and beyond, the interconnected stories in Goodnight, Beautiful Women bring us into the sultry, mysterious inner lives of New England women and girls as they navigate the dangers and struggles of their outer worlds. With novelistic breadth and a quicksilver emotional intelligence, Noyes explores the ruptures and vicissitudes of growing up and growing old, and shines a light on our most uncomfortable impulses while masterfully charting the depths of our murky desires.
A young wife watches her husband throw their earthly possessions one by one into the local quarry, before vanishing himself; two girls from very different social classes find themselves deep in the throes of a punishing affair; a motherless teenager is sexually awakened in the aftermath of a local trauma; and a woman's guilt from a childhood lie about her intellectually disabled cousin reverberates into her married years.
Dark and brilliant, rhythmic and lucid, Goodnight, Beautiful Women marks the arrival of a fearless and unique young new voice in American fiction.
"Silky, lucid ... fluid, raw, and strikingly original." - Publishers Weekly
"Noyes' first collection follows women, young and old, grappling with the unmoored moments of their lives...The characters in Noyes' 11 stories do not shy from their imperfections as they search for those fleeting, ambiguous moments of resolution." - Booklist
"These flawed female characters struggle to survive against threats both external and internal in this well-written debut." - Kirkus
"Set largely in coastal Maine, Anna Noyes's stunning debut collection concerns girls and women struggling to break away, dealing with burdens like mental illness and neglect that threaten to transform and define them." - Wall Street Journal "The Season's Most Exciting Fiction Reads"
"If Charles Baxter endorses a short story collection, you know it's worth checking out. In the case of Anna Noyes, the praise is well-deserved; she writes poignantly about women of all ages and economic backgrounds coming together and drifting apart in New England. The stories are loosely connected, demonstrating how the rippling effects of one event, of one lie, can reach farther than imaginable. - Huffington Post "22 Summer 2016 Books You Won't Want To Miss"
"With terrible grace, these stories bring to light the peril hidden within the mundane, and cast their enthralling shadow on characters that ache like you yourself have ached at your most private moments. Anna Noyes is a revelation." - Alexandra Kleeman
"Noyes' achievement here is nothing less than a high-wire act: precise, fearless, breathtaking. She casts an unwavering gaze on the nature of frailty and desire, offering up gem after gem in this sensuous and startling debut." - Téa Obreht
"Seductive, smart, and erotic, Anna Noyes' stories evoke with beautiful clarity love and sexual awakening. She is a most exciting discovery." - Lily King
"Assured and atmospheric, tender and melancholy, these stories of women adrift linger in the mind like music. I love them." - Karen Thompson Walker
"The thing us, some literature has personality. It shows a human being wrote it, not a machine. It is the one voice, the one soul, the real live touch of a singular hand. That is mastery and it is Anna Noyes." - Carolyn Chute
This information about Goodnight, Beautiful Women was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Anna Noyes is a recent graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her fiction has appeared in VICE, A Public Space, and Guernica, amongst others. She has received the Aspen Words Emerging Writer Fellowship and the James Merrill House Fellowship, and has served as writer-in-residence at the Polli Talu Arts Center in Estonia. Goodnight, Beautiful Women, received the 2013 Henfield Prize for Fiction.
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