LUCKY GIRLS (Art of the Story) - Softcover

Freudenberger, Nell

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0062915223 ISBN 13: 9780062915221

Publisher: EccoPress, 2019

Synopsis

First highlighted in The New Yorker fiction issue, here is award-winning writer Nell Freudenberger’s debut story collection

Lucky Girls is a collection of five novella-like stories, which take place mostly in Asia. The characters―expatriates, often by accident―are attracted to the places they find themselves in a romantic way, or repelled by a landscape where every object seems strange. For them, falling in love can be inseparable from the place where it happens.

Living according to unfamiliar rules, these characters are also vulnerable in unique ways. In the title story, a young woman who has been involved in a five-year affair with a married Indian man feels bound to both her memories and her adopted country after his death. The protagonist of “Outside the Eastern Gate” returns to her childhood home in Delhi, to find a house still inhabited by the impulsive, desperate spirit of her mother, who left her family for a wild journey over the Khyber Pass to Afghanistan. In “Letter from the Last Bastion,” a teenage girl begins a correspondence with a novelist who’s built his reputation writing about his experiences as a soldier in Vietnam and who, in his letters, confides in her a secret about his past.

Highly anticipated in the literary community and beyond, Lucky Girls marks the debut of a very special talent that places her among today’s most gifted young writers.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

The debut collection of Nell Freudenberger, who first came to national attention with the 2001 New Yorker publication of the title story, Lucky Girls encompasses five stories set in Southeast Asia and on the Indian subcontinent. They each bear the weight and substance of a short novella and are narrated by young women who find themselves, often as expatriates, face-to-face with the compelling circumstances of adult love. Living in unfamiliar places, according to new and often-frightening rules, these characters become vulnerable in unexpected ways and learn, as a result, to articulate the romantic attraction to landscapes and cultures that are strange to them.

In “Lucky Girls,” an American woman who has been involved in a five-year affair with a married Indian man feels bound, following his untimely death, to her memories of him and to her adopted country. And in “Letter from the Last Bastion,” a teenage girl begins a correspondence with a middle- aged male novelist, who, having built his reputation writing about his experiences as a soldier in Vietnam, confides in her the secret truth of those experiences, and the lie that has defined his life as a man.

Now in a new edition with a preface by the author, Lucky Girls marked the arrival of a writer of exceptional talents, one whose generosity of spirit, clarity of intellect and emotion, and skill in storytelling set her among our most gifted and exciting voices.

About the Author:

Nell Freudenberger is the author of the novels Lost and Wanted, The Newlyweds and The Dissident, and of the story collection Lucky Girls, which won the PEN/Malamud Award and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Named one of The New Yorker’s “20 under 40” in 2010, she is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and a Cullman Fellowship from the New York Public Library. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.

About this edition

• Publisher: EccoPress
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 0062915223
• ISBN 13: 9780062915221
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 272