βAll the tawdry details Iβm dying for are in these stories, but theyβre given out like old sweatersβwithout shame, without guile. Amy Hempel is the writer whomakes me feel most affiliated with other humans; we are all living this wayβhiding, alone, obsessedβand thatβs ok.β βMiranda July
From legendary writer Amy Hempel, one of the most celebrated and original voices in American short fiction: a ravishing, sometimes heartbreaking new story collectionβher first in over a decade.
Amy Hempel is a master of the short story. A multiple award winner, Hempel is highly regarded among writers, reviewers, and readers of contemporary fiction. This new collection, her first since her Collected Stories published more than a decade ago, is a literary event.
These fifteen exquisitely honed stories reveal Hempel at her most compassionate and spirited, as she introduces characters, lonely and adrift, searching for connection. In βA Full-Service Shelter,β a volunteer at a dog shelter tirelessly, devotedly cares for dogs on a list to be euthanized. In βGreed,β a spurned wife examines her husbandβs affair with a glamorous, older married woman. And in βCloudland,β the longest story in the collection, a woman reckons with the choice she made as a teenager to give up her newborn infant. Quietly dazzling, these stories are replete with moments of revelation and transcendence and with Hempelβs singular, startling, inimitable sentences.
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