Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published in USA
Oct 2016
184 pages
Genre: Short Stories/Essays
Publication Information
Joyce Carol Oates calls debut author Clare Beams "wickedly sharp-eyed, wholly unpredictable "a female/feminist voice for the twenty-first century."
The literary, historic, and fantastic collide in these wise and exquisitely unsettling stories. From bewildering assemblies in school auditoriums to the murky waters of a Depression-era health resort, Beams's landscapes are tinged with otherworldliness, and her characters' desires stretch the limits of reality. Ing énues at a boarding school bind themselves to their headmaster's vision of perfection ; a nineteenth-century landscape architect embarks on his first major project, but finds the terrain of class and power intractable ; a bride glimpses her husband's past when she wears his World War II parachute as a gown ; and a teacher comes undone in front of her astonished fifth graders.
As they capture the strangeness of being human, the stories in We Show What We Have Learned reveal Clare Beams's rare and capacious imagination - and yet they are grounded in emotional complexity, illuminating the ways we attempt to transform ourselves, our surroundings, and each other.
"Starred Review. A richly imagined and impeccably crafted debut." - Kirkus
"Beams is an expert at providing odd and surprising details that make her stories come alive, and the result is a powerful collection about what we need from others and, in turn, what we can offer others of ourselves." - Publishers Weekly
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Photo: Kristi Jan Hoover
Clare Beams is the author of the story collection We Show What We Have Learned, which won the Bard Prize and was a Kirkus Best Debut of 2016, as well as a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award, and the Shirley Jackson Award. With her husband and two daughters, she lives in Pittsburgh, where she teaches creative writing, most recently at Carnegie Mellon University and the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts.
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