Doll Palace - Softcover

Lippmann, Sara

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0991065719 ISBN 13: 9780991065714

Publisher: Dock Street Press, 2014

Synopsis

Fiction. In this brilliantly rendered, LA Times Book Prize nominated debut collection (as well as Longlisted for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award), Sara Lippmann draws the reader into the intimate lives of characters seeking connection beyond their scripted worlds. She captures the beguiling transformation from child to adult with humor, heartache, and desperation. From grieving mothers to fathers adrift, old flames to restless teens, isolated characters in DOLL PALACE are united by conflicting desires and the private struggles of the heart.

A girl ditches her innocence at a state fair. Strippers ponder love over a Brazilian wax. A father falls for a drug-addled babysitter. A mother ends a pregnancy. DOLL PALACE dwells in the harder-edged territories of human compassion, navigating the powerful, often unsettling ground rarely spoken of with awareness, care, and grace. DOLL PALACE is that rare collection that invites imitation but leaves a vast majority wondering how she did it.

About this title

From the Inside Flap

“Sara Lippmann's prose is unflinching. Her female characters see motherhood, womanhood and self-hood through a raw and funny lens: I am about to cry, when I laugh. Terribly wonderful and exciting work!” —Rachel Sherman, author of Living Room and The First Hurt “Sara Lippmann is the sort of writer who can drop you with a line. Of a guy wearing a baby in a harness, she writes, 'He yanks on the baby's stubby toes like he is milking it.' I'd read a hell of lot of pages to find a sentence that practically nails an entire generation. Good news is this book has such lines on every page. Lippmann is a fearless writer, and these are concise and deadly stories.”—Peter Orner, author of Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge “Sara Lippmann's Doll Palace is a sexy, sad and fearless collection full of humor, pathos and compassion. Her scalpel-sharp stories are raw emotional gems, blinding in their precision. Lippmann understands the pumping highways and byways of the human heart like a seasoned traveler.” —Jonathan Papernick, author of The Book of Stone “Sara Lippmann's stories are visceral and gripping, venturing into dark places with sharp wit and a gimlet eye. A lot of them gave me bad dreams, and I mean that in a good way. This is a memorable debut collection.” —Alix Ohlin, author of Inside Past traumas bleed into present experiences in Lippmann's stark, occasionally enigmatic debut collection.A divorced slacker dad, good in his teenage son's eyes only for beer runs and his not-too-attentive chaperonage of a ski trip, remains haunted by the car crash that killed his best friend ("The Last Resort"). Ten years after her toddler brother fell into an empty swimming pool and died before her eyes, the narrator of "Everyone Has Your Best Interests at Heart" is still punishing herself, listlessly going through the motions in a dead-end summer job, with no plans now that she's graduated high school, and taking up with the vaguely creepy host of a reptile show. Parenthood only brings more woe; in both "Jew" and "All This Happiness," thoughts of their terminally ill babies shadow the protagonists' actions. The settled moms of "Body Scan" and "Reunion" seem nostalgic for their wild, pre-kid days, while the embittered divorcée of "Doll Palace" says of her once-adored ex, "[e]veryone falls short in real life." Lippmann writes well about damaged lives and ambivalent relationships, and she displays a knack for crafting mildly surreal scenarios that reveal the characters' fragile emotional states ("Starter Home," "Talisman"). She also has a weakness for abruptly ringing down the curtain on her stories with jarring developments left ostentatiously unexplained ("The Best of Us," "Queen of Hearts," "Babydollz"). This taste for obfuscation is balanced by sharp observations of the social landscape: The mother crankily guiding two girls through endless lines at Doll Palace, the "overpriced and unopposed retailer of all things doll," or the restless wife attending the funeral of a high school boyfriend, passing "identical stucco townhomes with plastic play yards out front where apparently half of the entire class lived and screwed each other and worked to make ends meet." Smart and technically accomplished fiction that is sometimes a bit too self-consciously artful. —Kirkus Reviews Lippmann's worlds are beautifully rendered, from the menagerie of strollers on a New York side walk to the teddy bear décor of a boardwalk fudge shop, from the commercial overload of an American-Girl-Doll-esque café to the Russian bar in Brighton Beach where women high kick to every 80s favorite. The stories lead us to perfect endings, often ominous and not quite clear endings that made me re-read the last page. Even the re-read was a pleasure. (September 2014) – The Small Press Book Review Doll Palace (Dock Street Press, September 2014) by Sara Lippmann is a simple book, a simple collection of stories. There are no quotation marks and the feelings are equally bare. Lippmann is one of those authors who can get away with both seriousness and hilarity in the same sentence. The stories are sad and funny, heavy with lightness, stark with ferocious, bubbling paddling under the surface. —Sundog Lit

About the Author

Sara Lippmann received a BA from Brown and an MFA from The New School. She has written for national magazines, taught college English, and currently co-hosts the Sunday Salon, a monthly reading series at Jimmy's 43 in New York's East Village. Her stories have been published in Tupelo Quarterly, Joyland, Jewish Fiction, The Brooklyner, Slice Magazine, PANK and elsewhere, nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and included in Wigleaf's Top 50. A former mentor for Girls Write Now and a recipient of a 2012 Fellowship in Fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts she lives with her husband and children in Brooklyn.

About this edition

• Publisher: Dock Street Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0991065719
• ISBN 13: 9780991065714
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 258