Better Times: Short Stories (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781496207876)

Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, the stories in Better Times focus on what's happening in places people don't think to look. Women, sometimes displaced, often lonely, are at the heart of these stories. In Better Times Sara Batkie focuses on the moments in women's lives when the wider world is wrapped up in other matters: a father and daughter, separated by time and an ocean, dreaming of each other; a girl in a home for "troubled women" imagining the journey of the first dog in space; a phantom breast returning to haunt a woman after her mastectomy; a young woman giving birth to a litter of eggs. Such are the ordinary women weathering extraordinary circumstances in Better Times.

Divided into three sections covering the recent past, our current era, and the world to come, the stories gathered here--with characters stymied by loneliness, motherhood, illness, even cataclysmic climate change--interrogate the idea that so-called better times ever existed, particularly for women.

Author: Sara Batkie
ISBN-10: 1496207874
ISBN-13: 9781496207876
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Language: English
Published: 09/01/2018
Pages: 156
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.42lbs
Size: 8.50h x 5.50w x 0.34d

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 07/30/2018
Foreword 10/19/2018