This Life She's Chosen - Softcover

Sundberg Lunstrum, Kirsten

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0870813552 ISBN 13: 9780870813559

Publisher: Chronicle Books, 2006

Synopsis

The stories in this timeless anthology offer an intimate view of the lives, personalities, and milieus of ten unforgettable human beings. Although the characters are fictional, these aging men and women in Real Life deeply engage the reader, guiding attention to many profound and often surprising implications of growing older. With easy-to-follow commentaries and thought-provoking discussion questions, Real Life: Ten Stories of Aging will be an important supplementary reader for courses in gerontology, psychology, literature, medicine, nursing, and social work. For its charm, action, and color, Real Life will have a special appeal to fiction lovers.

About this title

About the Author

Kirsten Sundberg Lundstrum was born in 1979 in Chicago and raised in the Pacific Northwest. She currently lives in South Bend, Indiana, with her husband.

Review

"These tales are polished tidbits, like translucent stones you find on the beach: smooth to the touch but full of veins and cracks of underlying complexity. You can feel each story spreading in multiple directions, leaving you wanting more." -Seattle Times

"Still and hauntingly ambiguous, these collected stories seem inspired, even inhabited, by the coastal fog of the Pacific Northwest, where the author grew up and where most of the pieces are set. This is the fiction of mood and sensibility, not of incident. Accordingly, it is fiction about women, and about the interactions between them... These fictions evoke ongoing relationships that seem to stretch like a timeline fore and aft, passing briefly through one crystallizing moment." -Boston Globe

"This Life She's Chosen, finely wrought stories by Puget Sound area native Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum, herald the arrival of a striking new talent. In her mid-20s, Lunstrum writes with a quiet confidence rare in so young an author, and we willingly surrender ourselves to her sure and steady prose...this collection marks an impressive debut, written with an admirable restraint that throws into sharper relief the emotional turmoil of the characters. There is a clean whiff of the prairie - reminiscent of Willa Cather - in these tales of stoic people soldiering on as best they can through their lives. Lunstrum's next book will be eagerly awaited." -Tacoma News Tribune

"Northwest author Lunstrum's measured approach yields moments of lovely, imagistic immediacy: "Her body was soft, dimpled just above her backside, her hips lined with fine pale stretch marks like hairline fractures on a porcelain dish." Read one at a time, these stories have an atmospheric sort of power, like a melancholy song that haunts the listener hours after it's heard." -Seattle Weekly

"A fine debut collection of engaging short stories, many focused on dynamics between individuals." -Seattle Post-Intelligencer

"Lunstrum takes readers on a sensory tour of the West Coast, from Anchorage to Omak, from Spokane to Seattle and on down to northern California, detailing the landscape with the same sensitive focus as she does her characters. This Life is delicate in nature, bringing forth the subtlest tensions between mothers and daughters, husbands and wives. Lunstrum's language is deft and fluid.... It's from within this soft insight that the messages emerge, messages about grace and letting go." -Spokane Inlander

Edition details

• Publisher: Chronicle Books
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0870813552
• ISBN 13: 9780870813559
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 192