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Your next favorite book
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A stunning collection of stories exploring love and art, luck and loss, from the "invaluable" (George Saunders) author of How to Behave in a Crowd and The Material.
A young woman takes stock after the burglary of her apartment. A teenager becomes obsessed with the obituaries in a weekly magazine. Grandchildren mourn the grandparents who loved them and the grandparents who didn't. Painters and almost-painters try to distinguish Good Art from Bad Art. People grapple with life-altering illness, unrequited love, and promises they have every intention of keeping. Some win the lottery. Others don't.
In these sinewy, thoughtful stories, celebrated New Yorker contributor Camille Bordas delves into the mysteries of life, death, and all that happens in between. At once darkly funny and poignantly self-aware, Bordas's writing offers a window into our shared, flawed humanity without insisting on a perfect understanding of our experiences.
With her first collection, which gathers previously unpublished stories alongside work originally featured in The New Yorker and The Paris Review, Bordas cements her reputation as a master of the form.
"Distinguished by the author's sly wit and complex understanding of the human condition, these stories leave a mark." ―Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Bordas is a master vivisectionist of inner life...There's nothing here that feels finessed or artificed. Bordas's characters don't feel real because the author has ingeniously lined up precisely the right details to convey an essence, to convey a message; they feel real because no matter what these characters see or do, what contingencies or oddities or incoherences loom into view, they respond in authentically idiosyncratic ways...Utterly delightful." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Sublime...With sharp humor, Bordas' stories reveal the fragile seams in her characters' current states while also nimbly exposing the peculiarities of human nature." —Booklist
"Camille Bordas writes toward the quiet pressure points—the joke with a bruise under it, the love that won't behave, the losses that don't end when the funeral does. The prose is exact, unshowy, funny when it hurts to be, and tender without asking for mercy. These stories don't close so much as continue inside you. They tilt the world and don't set it back, leaving you to live with the shift." —Morgan Talty, author of Fire Exit and Night of the Living Rez
"Bordas's narrators share a particular sensibility—smart, mordantly funny, and sharp-eyed about contemporary life on both sides of the Atlantic—but the stories themselves never land where you might expect. I hope this is the first of many collections, because I want to be reading Bordas for the rest of my life." —Nell Freudenberger, author of The Limits and Lucky Girls
This information about One Sun Only 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.
Camille Bordas is a novelist and short story writer. She is the author of two novels in English, The Material and How to Behave in a Crowd. Her earlier two, Partie Commune and Les Treize Desserts, were written in her native French. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, and The Paris Review. She has been named a Guggenheim Fellow. Born in France, raised in Mexico City and Paris, she currently lives in Chicago.
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