Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction
by Karen Brown
Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Sep 2012
208 pages
Genre: Short Stories
Publication Information
Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, Karen Brown's Little Sinners, and Other Stories features a sad, strange mosaic of women and men grappling with the loss and pain of everyday existence, people inhabiting a suburban landscape haunted by ghosts: a mother who leaps from a ridge, a mistress found at the bottom of the Connecticut River, a father who dresses in a pale blue-custom suit - and disappears. The dead leave behind postcards, houses, bottles of sherry, bones. They become local legends, their stories part of the characters' own: an expectant mother in an isolated cottage on Long Island Sound uncovers an unsettling secret in her backyard; a troubled housewife is lured to a dinner party by a teenage girl whose mother has vanished under mysterious circumstances; a woman and her lover swim the pools of their neighborhood under cover of darkness; a young heiress struggles with mortality and the abandonments in her past.
These stories capture the domestic world in all its blighted promise - a world where women's roles in housekeeping, marriage, childbirth, and sex have been all too well defined, and where the characters fashion, recklessly and passionately, their own methods of escape.
"Starred Review. While occasionally marred by overly precious flourishes, the suspenseful writing and menacing erotic tension have a narrative pull that compels
attention." - Publishers Weekly
"Brown's detailed style, meticulous in describing character and place, creates realistic slices of life...Her stories will appeal to short-fiction readers for their strength of style and depth of emotional resonance." - Booklist
"I love this book. The characters in Little Sinners are sexy and knowing, and often behave badly, which makes them such fun to read about. They all possess bold, wayward hearts, and appetites that lead them to bliss or self-destruction, sometimes both." - Christine Sneed, author of Portraits of a Few of the People I’ve Made Cry, Grace Paley Prize winner
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Karen Brown’s first collection of short stories, Pins and Needles, won the Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction, and her stories have been included in The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2009 and The Best American Short Stories 2008.
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