From Kate Walbert, the highly acclaimed, National Book Award nominee, comes a dazzling, career-spanning collection of new and selected stories.
In these twelve deft, acutely funny and often heartbreaking stories, Kate Walbert delves into the hearts and minds of women. Her characters are searchers, uneasy in one way or another. They yearn for connection. They question the definitions assigned to them as wives, mothers, and daughters; they seek their own way within isolated, and often isolating, circumstances, reveling in small, everyday epiphanies and moments of clarity.
In the riveting opening story “M&M World,” a woman is plunged into panic when she briefly loses one of her daughters at the vast and over-stimulating Times Square store. In “Slow the Heart,” a single mother tries to ease tension at the dinner table with Roses and Thorns, the game she knows the Obamas played in the White House. In “Radical Feminists,” a woman skating with her two children encounters the man who derailed her career years earlier. And in the poignant, “A Mother Is Someone Who Tells Jokes,” a mother reflects on the nursery school project that preceded her son’s autism diagnosis. This is a deeply moving, resonant collection from a writer “rightly celebrated for her ability to capture the variety and vulnerability of women’s lives with a combination of lyricism and brawn” (NPR).
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“A fascinatingly integrated story collection…Mother love brings strange moments of what can only be called grace, moments Walbert captures with an unusual combination of restraint and rhapsody.”
— New York Times Book Review
“This is a piercing, intimate, and exquisite collection.”
— Publishers Weekly“Tales of spare, unflinching beauty show how love and loneliness can occupy a heart together.”
— Kirkus Reviews“I loved these stories, wide-open, varied, generous, warm, funny.”
— Tessa Hadley, author of Late in the DayBe the first to write a review about this audiobook!
Kate Walbert is the author of His Favorites, and five previous books of fiction: The Sunken Cathedral, a New York Times Book Review ten best books of the year and finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Our Kind, a National Book Award finalist; The Gardens of Kyoto; and the story collection Where She Went. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Prize stories.
Cassandra Campbell has won multiple Audie Awards, Earphones Awards, and the prestigious Odyssey Award for narration. She was been named a “Best Voice” by AudioFile magazine and in 2018 was inducted in Audible’s inaugural Narrator Hall of Fame.
Arthur Morey has won three AudioFile Magazine “Best Of” Awards, and his work has garnered numerous AudioFile Earphones Awards and placed him as a finalist for two Audie Awards. He has acted in a number of productions, both off Broadway in New York and off Loop in Chicago. He graduated from Harvard and did graduate work at the University of Chicago. He has won awards for his fiction and drama, worked as an editor with several book publishers, and taught literature and writing at Northwestern University. His plays and songs have been produced in New York, Chicago, and Milan, where he has also performed.
Cynthia Farrell, an Earphones Award–winning narrator, is a singer and voice actor best known for her roll as Catalina in the video games Grand Theft Auto III and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. She has also performed off Broadway and has released a number of records.
Devon Sorvari is an Earphones Award–winning and Audie Award–nominated narrator. She graduated from NYU’s Circle in the Square program and the Classical Studio. She has nationwide theater credits ranging from Shakespeare to musicals.