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Published Oct 2019
256 pages
Genre: Short Stories
Publication Information
From Kate Walbert, the highly acclaimed, National Book Award nominee, comes a dazzling, career-spanning collection of new and selected stories.
In these twelve deft, acutely funny and often heartbreaking stories, Kate Walbert delves into the hearts and minds of women. Her characters are searchers, uneasy in one way or another. They yearn for connection. They question the definitions assigned to them as wives, mothers, and daughters; they seek their own way within isolated, and often isolating, circumstances, reveling in small, everyday epiphanies and moments of clarity.
In the riveting opening story "M&M World," a woman is plunged into panic when she briefly loses one of her daughters at the vast and over-stimulating Times Square store. In "Slow the Heart," a single mother tries to ease tension at the dinner table with Roses and Thorns, the game she knows the Obamas played in the White House. In "Radical Feminists," a woman skating with her two children encounters the man who derailed her career years earlier. And in the poignant, "A Mother Is Someone Who Tells Jokes," a mother reflects on the nursery school project that preceded her son's autism diagnosis. This is a deeply moving, resonant collection from a writer "rightly celebrated for her ability to capture the variety and vulnerability of women's lives with a combination of lyricism and brawn" (NPR).
"This is a piercing, intimate, and exquisite collection." - Publishers Weekly
"Tales of spare, unflinching beauty show how love and loneliness can occupy a heart together." - Kirkus Reviews
"These stories from National Book Award and Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist Walbert are poignant and compelling; each is complete in itself but will leave the reader wanting more. Recommended for all short story readers." - Library Journal
"Kate Walbert is inarguably one of our foremost chroniclers of the existential dilemma of being not just a woman, but a human. With astonishing precision, alive and alert to the complications embedded in even the simplest exchange, Walbert slips into the fissures and fault lines of her utterly compelling characters doing the best of what a writer can do: she makes the familiar strange, and in doing so, reveals the glorious complexity of a world we only think we know." - Marisa Silver, author of Mary Coin
"I loved these stories, wide-open, varied, generous, warm, funny." - Tessa Hadley, author of Late in the Day
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
© Deborah Donenfeld
Kate Walbert was born in New York City and raised in Georgia, Texas, Japan and Pennsylvania, among other places. She is the author of the novels The Sunken Cathedral, among the San Francisco Chronicle's best books of 2015; A Short History of Women, chosen by The New York Times Book Review as one of the ten best books of 2009 and a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize; Our Kind, a finalist for the National Book Award, and The Gardens of Kyoto, as well as the linked stories, Where She Went. She's received a National Endowment for the Arts fiction fellowship, a Connecticut Commission on the Arts fiction fellowship, and a Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library, and her stories has been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Best...
... Full Biography
Author Interview
Link to Kate Walbert's Website
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