Little Sinners and Other Stories (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780803243422)

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.


Author: Karen Brown
ISBN-10: 0803243421
ISBN-13: 9780803243422
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Language: English
Published: 09/01/2012
Pages: 208
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.60lbs
Size: 8.40h x 5.60w x 0.20d

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 07/16/2012 pg. 143
Booklist 08/01/2012 pg. 24
Publishers Weekly Best Books 11/05/2012 pg. 25