Story Collection Offers Loving But Pointed School Satire

wpadm — Tue, 01 Oct 2019 17:47:00 +0000

Lorraine M. López’s Postcards from the Gerund State deals with a culturally diverse group of women faculty who struggle to get along with each other and with their less-than-elite school. López’s humorous but loving portrait of these women’s struggles brings an important perspective to our nation’s conflicting expectations of education and the faculty who deliver it.

Postcards follows these faculty members, mostly in the visual and literary arts, as they adjust to the hilarious surprises of life at Birnbrau, a fictional women’s college in Georgia with its own characteristic dysfunctions. In the culminating novella that concludes the collection, the group attend a residency at a Wyoming artist colony where for a full month, they cannot avoid or escape each other, as much as they might wish for it. Kirkus Reviews calls the book “an empathetic, often savagely comic portrait of the struggles of working women in what might be deemed an elite profession.” “Lorraine López has done it again. With singular wit and humor, she has gifted us with stories that probe the meaning of art and the realities of being an artist, a woman, and a caregiver,” writes Daisy Hernández, author of A Cup of Water Under My Bed. Kevin Wilson, author of Baby, You’re Gonna Be Mine, writes, “because Lopez is so masterful, she ties that humor to deeply complex characters, a unique community, their relationships so wonderfully examined.”

López teaches at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. Her previous BkMk book, Homicide Survivors Picnic, was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. She is also the author of Soy La Avon Lady and Call Me Henri from Curbstone Press, The Gifted Gabaldón Sisters and The Realm of Hungry Spirits from Grand Central, and The Darling from University of Arizona Press.

Fiction Debut Features Linked Stories of Coastal Connecticut Youth Coming of Age

wpadm — Thu, 12 Sep 2019 16:59:00 +0000

Stone Skimmers, a story collection and fiction debut by Jennifer Wisner Kelly, was chosen by Stewart O’Nan for the G. S. Sharat Chandra Prize for Short Fiction and will be published Nov. 5 by BkMk Press, University of Missouri-Kansas City. Kelly lives in Concord, Massachusetts, and is available for bookstore and library appearances in the New England area, where many of the stories in her book take place.

Stone Skimmers opens in pristine, affluent Old Stonington, Connecticut, where a peculiar fifteen-year-old girl swims for hours each day across the town reservoir, lost to her own obsessions. The popular crowd spies from shore, mocking her strangeness, cozy in their camaraderie, until one betrays the group by befriending the outsider.

The remaining six stories follow this splintered clique into adulthoods rife with isolation and loss, exploring the lives of those who stayed in the sheltered world of their childhoods and the challenges faced by those who chose to leave.

During a cave dive in Mexico, a jealous young woman sacrifices her sister in a desperate attempt to appease the gods of fertility. An overwhelmed mother forms an intimate connection with a wild fox after her husband abandons both his family and his utopian farming fantasy.A troubled son sent to an agricultural reform school becomes captivated by a friend who purports to commune with Jesus. A young widow must institutionalize her elderly aunt, a society lady stripped of decorum and reason by dementia, perpetually reliving her life’s one great disaster.

The collection ultimately offers a profound exploration of what it means to come of age amid the astonishing joys and losses of adulthood, and amid the challenges that each of us face in shaping our own lives out of the origins into which we were born.

Jennifer Wisner Kelly grew up in Connecticut, where most of the stories in Stone Skimmers are set. Her work has appeared in Poets & Writers, Greensboro Review, Massachusetts Review, and Beloit Fiction Journal. She is a graduate of Harvard, University of Chicago Law School, and Warren Wilson College’s MFA program. She now lives in Concord, Massachusetts and practices law at a domestic violence advocacy nonprofit. Stone Skimmers is her debut book.

Short Fiction – BkMk Press

Story Collection Offers Loving But Pointed School Satire

Fiction Debut Features Linked Stories of Coastal Connecticut Youth Coming of Age