Whenever I take on a new short story project, I read other writers to admire them, study them, and be inspired by them; itâs like talking with old friends. These five books took me through the heart and soul of what it is to be or to have a mother, to be or to have children, to love or to lose love, to maintain the rituals and magic of family or let them go. Although I believe men can write female characters and women can write males, I really appreciate the fine-tuned ear for the nuances of motherhood, womanhood, and relationships I find in collections written by women about women.
Humidity, rain, heat, and danger saturate this book: you can feel it. In âMidnight Zone,â a young mother has to summon all her power to protect her children from the panther that lurks outside in the dark. What could be a story about one woman dealing with her own limitations becomes one about the power and danger of mother-love. Groffâs book is filled with characters like this: steely, honest, and flawed, all at once. Above all, her women and children are much stronger and more resilient than you think.Â
From the universally acclaimed, New York Times bestselling author of Fates and Furies and Matrix
Florida is a "superlative" book (Boston Globe), "frequently funny" (San Francisco Chronicle), "brooding, inventive and often moving" (NPR Fresh Air) --as Groff is recognized as "Florida's unofficial poet laureate, as Joan Didion was for California." (Washington Post)
In her thrilling new book, Lauren Groff brings the reader into a physical world that is at once domestic and wildâa place where the hazards of the natural worldâŚ
I love anything by Alice Munro; you can see why she won the Nobel Prize. Munro's stories sweep through huge swaths of time in simple, straightforward language; one minute you find a man in a friendâs kitchen eating a ketchup sandwich; within a few pages you are a girl again, and this man a boy, your first love, maybe. Munroâs characters are complicated, sometimes black-hearted, often conflicted and yearning, and so very real that you feel like you talked with them in the grocery store just yesterday.
In the her tenth collection (the title story of which is the basis for the new film Hateship Loveship), Alice Munro achieves new heights, creating narratives that loop and swerve like memory, and conjuring up characters as thorny and contradictory as people we know ourselves. A tough-minded housekeeper jettisons the habits of a lifetime because of a teenagerâs practical joke. A college student visiting her brassy, unconventional aunt stumbles on an astonishing secret and its meaning in her own life. An incorrigible philanderer responds with unexpected grace to his wifeâs nursing-home romance.âŚ
A witchy paranormal cozy mystery told through the eyes of a fiercely clever (and undeniably fabulous) feline familiar.
Iâm Juno. Snow-white fur, sharp-witted, and currently stuck working magical animal control in the enchanted town of Crimson Cove. My witch, Zandra Crypt, and I only came here to find her missingâŚ
Reading a Karen Russell short story is like riding the roller coaster at Space Mountain. Her stories are speedy, thrilling, and youâre never sure whatâs coming at you. This collection, told mostly by children, amps up the thrills. Kids visit ice skating apes, wrangle alligators, hide out in oversized conch shells, search for swamp ghosts. The title story, âSt. Lucyâs Home for Girls Raised by Wolves,â takes a quirky premiseâferal children are sent to a Jesuit school to learn etiquetteâand ramps up the elements so that we can see the cruel, sad outcomes of molding young girls against their natures.St. Lucyâs is edgy, often surreal, definitely quirky, and fiercely imaginative.
Charting loss, love, and the difficult art of growing up, these stories unfurl with wicked humour and insight. Two young boys make midnight trips to a boat graveyard in search of their dead sister, who set sail in the exoskeleton of a giant crab; a boy whose dreams foretell implacable tragedies is sent to 'Sleepaway Camp for Disordered Dreamers' (Cabin 1, Narcoleptics; Cabin 2, Insomniacs; Cabin 3, Somnambulists. . . ); a Minotaur leads his family on the trail out West, and finally, in the collection's poignant and hilarious title story, fifteen girls raised by wolves are painstakingly re-civilised byâŚ
McCracken was a librarian at my local library before she was a New York Times bestseller, so Iâve always eagerly read her books, beginning with The Giantâs House. I love Thunderstruckbecause itâs typical McCracken â unique, funny, tragic, and smart. In spite of the fact that accidents and death are ubiquitous, that wounds donât magically heal, and that grief haunts many of the stories, this is not a maudlin book. McCracken can make you laugh out loud. Irony, wry humor, and joy live right next to cruel tragedy throughout the book. Best of all, compassion and tenderness abound.
WINNER OF THE STORY PRIZE ⢠LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD ⢠NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NEWSDAY
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Washington Post â˘Â San Francisco Chronicle ⢠O: The Oprah Magazine ⢠The Miami Herald ⢠Publishers Weekly ⢠Kirkus Reviews
Look for special features inside. Join the Random House Readerâs Circle for author chats and more.
From the author of the beloved novel The Giantâs Houseâfinalist for the National Book Awardâcomes a beautiful new story collection, her first in twenty years. Laced throughâŚ
This is the fourth book in the Joplin/Halloran forensic mystery series, which features Hollis Joplin, a death investigator, and Tom Halloran, an Atlanta attorney.
It's August of 2018, shortly after the Republican National Convention has nominated Donald Trump as its presidential candidate. Racial and political tensions are rising, and soâŚ
In my very favorite story in this book full of favorites, âPilgrims,â young children cope with adult reality in a Lord of the Flies-like atmosphere where a tragic accident is offset by the innocent gift of a lost tooth, a talisman meant to create magic in a world that can seem devoid of it. How to Breatheforefronts girls and teens struggling with guilt, peer pressure, identity, envy, sickness, death. Sounds grim, but the writing, the world Orringer creates, is as beautiful and moving as it is dark. Her characters are the kind you can live inside, remember being, feel for. I think about them a lot, still, and I read the book more than a decade ago.
A New York Times notable book and winner of The Northern California Book Award for Best Short Fiction, these nine brave, wise, and spellbinding stories make up this debut. In "When She is Old and I Am Famous" a young woman confronts the inscrutable power of her cousin's beauty. In "Note to Sixth-Grade Self" a band of popular girls exert their social power over an awkward outcast. In "Isabel Fish" fourteen-year-old Maddy learns to scuba dive in order to mend her family after a terrible accident. Alive with the victories, humiliations, and tragedies of youth, How to Breathe Underwaterilluminates thisâŚ
The stories in Unaccustomed to Grace are often set in a slant version of reality that is ebullient, fierce, and reassuringly human. In âWaiting for Ivyâ a woman grieving the loss of her infant daughter discovers a listserv of parents whose dead children have been returned, as if the tragedy were a clerical error. In âCorpse Walks Into a Barâ an indigent loner agrees to bury a reanimated corpse, not realizing what it takes to find a resting place when the dead are as self-serving as the living. Ultimately, the book plumbs the messiness we bring on ourselves with the best of intentions, and how we work our way toward redemption. The Boston Globe calls Grace âwise, warm, and wily.â
In an underground coal mine in Northern Germany, over forty scribes who are fluent in different languages have been spared the camps to answer letters to the deadâletters that people were forced to answer before being gassed, assuring relatives that conditions in the camps were good.Â
Secrets, lies, and second chances are served up beneath the stars in this moving novel by the bestselling author of This Is Not How It Ends. Think White Lotus meets Virgin River set at a picturesque mountain inn.
Seven days in summer. Eight lives forever changed. The stage isâŚ
