So Much a Part of You Audiobook

Quotes

• “This debut is a collection of short stories that tell a tale along a long and circuitous route. At first, the stories seem completely unrelated, until you realize that often the main characters are secondary in some of the other stories. The prose is gorgeous.”

  — RT Book Reviews

• “In the ten  stories of this cycle, you will meet Anna Riley, Anne Cavanaugh, Peter Herring, and their families and friends in a variety of American cities, spanning the years from the Depression to the late twentieth century. Strong characterization and acute rendering of settings provide glimpses into the successes and sorrows of these middle-class Irish Catholics…Although short story fans are a natural audience for this promising debut, it will also appeal to general fiction readers.”

  — Booklist (starred review)

• “Dugan makes a solid debut with this collection of ten interconnected short stories that involve two women, college friends Anna Riley and Anne Cavenaugh, and Peter Herring, a man in both their lives…Dugan’s writing flows well and with thoughtfulness as she explores love, loss, and friendship through the three main characters and their families.”

  — Publishers Weekly

• “As the narratives explore love, faith, betrayal, joy, friendship, and tragedy, they highlight how choices made by parents influence their offspring so indelibly. With decisive economy and the dramatic immediacy lent by her use of the present tense, Dugan’s powerful stories present a fast-paced, cohesive, and satisfying read.”

  — Library Journal

• “A debut collection that could practically pass for a novel; almost all the stories feature members of a single family through three generations, focusing on Anna Riley as she grows from childhood equestrienne to wife and mother…Not surprisingly, Dugan is at work on a novel, which readers will eagerly anticipate after reading this promising collection.”

  — Kirkus Reviews

• “This is what short story should be: exact and faithful invocations, full of nerve and stranded emotion, which leave eddying waves of thought and strangeness that linger long after the covers are closed shut. The stories are simultaneously eerie and poignant. They achieve a cool distance and the captured moment, the effect of which is how lonely and alien we can be to ourselves and together. The pathway to the heart is through the mind. I think of such writers as Joy Williams and Ann Beattie, only more spare and more raw and who, in their own way, were more spare and raw than O’Connor and Welty.”

  — Robert Olmstead, award winning author of Coal Black Horse

• “There's a rawness to Polly Dugan’s stories that lure you in and won’t let go. The settings may be every day, but So Much a Part of You lingers in the imagination."

  — Lucinda Rosenfeld, author of The Pretty One

• “Polly Dugan’s stories read like whispered secrets. With their quiet drama, their nuanced internal conflicts, their characters full of longing, they immerse us in the messy mysteries of ordinary lives. But their vision is clear-headed and generous: they show us that even our briefest connections, our smallest actions, our most private thoughts can have great weight and consequence.”

  — Scott Nadelson, author of Aftermath

• This is what short story should be: exact and faithful invocations, full of nerve and stranded emotion, which leave eddying waves of thought and strangeness that linger long after the covers are closed shut. The stories are simultaneously eerie and poignant. They achieve a cool distance and the captured moment, the effect of which is how lonely and alien we can be to ourselves and together. The pathway to the heart is through the mind. I think of such writers as Joy Williams and Ann Beattie, only more spare and more raw and who, in their own way, were more spare and raw than O'Connor and Welty.

  — Robert Olmstead

• Polly Dugan makes the greatest deal the best of literature can offer--she will be honest, completely bare, and deliver a reader wholly into the secret world of her character's empathy. What a powerful and glorious thing it was to become these characters, to have my worldview touched by their lives. It's a rare skill to write pain with such love, such care, such warmth, and like Alice Munro and Elizabeth Strout, Polly Dugan has achieved a small miracle in breaking my heart and still having me ask for more. SO MUCH A PART OF YOUannounces a potent and fresh new voice to the landscape of short fiction.

  — Alan Heathcock

• There's a rawness to Polly Dugan's stories that lure you in and won't let go. The settings may be every day, but SO MUCH A PART OF YOU lingers in the imagination.

  — Lucinda Rosenfeld, author of The Pretty One

• Polly Dugan's stories read like whispered secrets. With their quiet drama, their nuanced internal conflicts, their characters full of longing, they immerse us in the messy mysteries of ordinary lives. But their vision is clear-headed and generous: they show us that even our briefest connections, our smallest actions, our most private thoughts can have great weight and consequence.

  — Scott Nadelson, author of Aftermath

• A solid debut.... Dugan's writing flows well and with thoughtfulness as she explores love, loss, and friendship through the three main characters and their families. Their decisions and foibles make for some emotional reading.

  — Publishers Weekly

• By portraying various individuals in their twenties and thirties as they move through formative stages in their lives, the ten linked stories in Dugan's debut collection convincingly capture the human condition.... With decisive economy and the dramatic immediacy lent by her use of the present tense, Dugan's powerful stories present a fast-paced, cohesive, and satisfying read.

  — Joyce Townsend, Library Journal

• Readers, take notice.... Strong characterization and acute rendering of settings provide glimpses into the successes and sorrows of these middle-class Irish Catholics.... Although short story fans are a natural audience for this promising debut, it will also appeal to general fiction readers.

  — Ellen Loughran, Booklist (starred review)

• A debut collection that could practically pass for a novel.... Subtlety of characterization is often the writer's strength, as her stories move through the conventional details of domesticity to panic attacks and 'uncharted insanity,' showing the fragility beneath even the most stable lives.

  — Kirkus Reviews

• Polly Dugan strikes the heart in SO MUCH A PART OF YOU.

  — Vanity Fair, "Hot Type"

• What struck me about the stories in SO MUCH A PART OF YOU is how finely wrought they are, how controlled.

  — Steve Almond, Rumpus

• A quiet triumph.... SO MUCH A PART OF YOU marries the scope of a novel with the graceful economy of a good short story. The linked stories in the collection are individually modest, almost unobtrusive. Set against one another, though, they reveal surprising connections-reflecting perspective and insight back onto themselves.... Part of the pleasure of this book is that it brings the reader into glancing proximity to so many people, and so many stories. It's about as close as fiction comes to capturing the way people really do move in and out of each others' lives.

  — Alison Hallett, Portland Mercury

• Utterly real and insightful.

  — BookPage