Critics' Opinion:
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Published Jul 2011
224 pages
Genre: Short Stories
Publication Information
Eleven women confront dramas both everyday and outlandish in Caitlin Horrocks's This Is Not Your City. In stories as darkly comic as they are unflinching, people isolated by geography, emotion, or circumstance cut imperfect paths to peace - they have no other choice. A Russian mail-order bride in Finland is rendered silent by her dislocation and loss of language, the mother of a severely disabled boy writes him postcards he'll never read on a cruise ship held hostage by pirates, and an Iowa actuary wanders among the reincarnations of those she's known in her 127 lives. Horrocks's women find no simple escapes, and their acts of faith and acts of imagination in making do are as shrewd as they are surprising.
"Starred Review. Plimpton Prize winner Horrocks effortlessly navigates the comedy and bewilderment of being middle class without an ounce of condescension, martyrdom, or sensationalism." - Publishers Weekly
"The author has a fine eye for detail in description and scene setting and moves the story lines along jaggedly so the reader is caught off guard and disoriented like the characters. Many of the stories are bleak, painfully and realistically detailing lives gone awry, to sometimes disturbing effect. " - Library Journal
"Caitlin Horrocks is that literary phenomenon: a master storyteller. This Is Not Your City is smart, entertaining, and emotionally mesmerizing - a superb, daredevil immersion steeped in grace." - Melissa Pritchard, author of Disappearing Ingenue and Late Bloomer
"This is Not Your City is a spooky, lovely book by an almost unbelievably versatile, self-assured, and talented young writer. Caitlin Horrocks is a writer to remember; This is Not Your City is a book impossible to forget." - Brock Clarke, author of Exley and An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England
"The world of This Is Not Your City is a place of graceful extremes. Ravenous for love, for connection, for family, characters race into one another's arms, only to find more sorrow and more joy than they had imagined possible. Humor and grief braid tightly through these searching stories, and Caitlin Horrocks' vision is always lovely, often wrenching, and always surprising." - Erin McGraw, author of The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard
This information about This Is Not Your City was first featured
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Caitlin Horrocks lives in Michigan, by way of Ohio, Arizona, England, Finland, and the Czech Republic. Her stories and essays have appeared in The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2009, The Paris Review, Tin House, The Southern Review, The Gettysburg Review, Epoch, and other journals. Her work has been short-listed in Best American Short Stories and has won awards from the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers' Conferences and The Atlantic Monthly. She was formerly the 2006-2007 Theresa A. Wilhoit Fellow at Arizona State University and the prose editor of Hayden's Ferry Review. Things she loves that have shown up in her fiction: reality television, zoos, otters, snow, sleep. Things that haven't (yet): bread, koalas, hockey, West Michigan beer, and Bananagrams. Currently, she is an assistant professor of writing at Grand Valley State University and lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan. For more information, please visit her website at www.caitlinhorrocks.com.
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