Female Trouble: Stories - Hardcover

Nelson, Antonya

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 074321871X ISBN 13: 9780743218719

Publisher: Scribner, 2002

Synopsis

A collection of thirteen stories includes "Incognito," "Loose Cannon," and the title story about marriage, family, and female life.

About this title

About the Author

Antonya Nelson is the author of three novels and three previous short-story collections. She has been awarded the Chicago Tribune's Heartland Award, the Flannery O'Connor Award, the PEN Nelson Algren Award, the O. Henry Prize, and a Guggenheim. Her short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, and Esquire, as well as in The O. Henry Awards and Best American Short Stories anthologies. She lives in Las Cruces, New Mexico, with her husband, the writer Robert Boswell, and their two children.

From Publishers Weekly

Uneven but deeply affecting, Nelson's fourth story collection (she's also written three novels) maps the dimensions of the human usually female heart, both in love and in grief. Troubles, as the title suggests, abound: affairs, infertility, mental illness, death. But so does humor (a vacation home where a family gathers "to remind themselves how badly they got along" and a kind of hard-won, essential wisdom ("all a person could do was the right thing," a grieving widow muses, as she reconciles herself to a simultaneously "merciful" and "treacherous" future.) In the title story, a well-meaning but emotionally stunted man attempting to understand the three women in his life the matronly woman he lives with, the pregnant former girlfriend who moves in and the suicidal mental patient he takes for a lover comes to the conclusion that their wants and needs are so complicated that it's time he left town. However poorly that may reflect on him, readers will be tempted to nod in sympathy: Nelson's women in particular tend toward desperation and upheaval. And they have appetites if life were a jukebox, they want the volume turned up loud. Yet their desires are basic: to love and to be loved, to have children, to protect them. The notion of caregiving its successes and failures plays an important role in these stories: in "Loose Cannon" and "Ball Peen," brothers, however unequipped to handle their own lives, try to nurture struggling sisters; in "Palisades," a woman adrift in a vacation town becomes the confidante to a husband and a wife, who tell her the kinds of things they can't tell each other. Cheerful uplifting moments may be rare, but this collection's tales of men and women navigating life in all its messiness demonstrate the prowess of a truly accomplished writer.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 074321871X
• ISBN 13: 9780743218719
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256