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.
Product Identifiers
Publisher
University of Nebraska Press
ISBN-13
9780803243422
eBay Product ID (ePID)
115706862
Product Key Features
Book Title
Little Sinners, and Other Stories
Author
Karen Brown
Format
Paperback
Language
English
Topic
Short Stories
Publication Year
2012
Number of Pages
208 Pages
Dimensions
Item Height
216mm
Item Width
140mm
Additional Product Features
Title_Author
Karen Brown
Series Title
The Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction