Fire Sermon - Softcover

Jamie Quatro

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1509858563 ISBN 13: 9781509858569

Publisher: Picador, 2018

Synopsis

Maggie is entirely devoted to her husband Thomas, their two beautiful children, and to God. But then what begins as innocent letter writing with poet James starts to become something far more erotically charged, there meeting of minds threatening to become a meeting of bodies. As everything Maggie believes in is thrown into doubt the reader is drawn ever deeper into the battleground of her soul. Fire Sermon is a daring debut novel of obsession, desire and salvation that shows the radical light and dark of love itself. This is a visceral, rich and devastating portrait of life and loves lived and lost that cannot fail to echo in your own experience.

About this title

About the Author

JAMIE QUATRO's debut collection, I Want To Show You More, was a New York Times Notable Book, NPR Best Book of 2013, O, The Oprah Magazine summer reading pick, and New York Times Editors' Choice. The collection was named a Top Ten Book of 2013 by Dwight Garner in the New York Times, a Favorite Book of 2013 by James Wood in The New Yorker, and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, the Georgia Townsend Fiction Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize. She is the recipient of a 2017 Pushcart Prize. Quatro's fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in Tin House, McSweeney's, The New York Times Book Review, and elsewhere. Quatro lives with her husband and four children in Lookout Mountain, Georgia.

Review

Jamie Quatro has taken one of the great themes - infidelity - and subjected it to her own exacting and poetic brand of scrutiny. At times painfully honest, always intensely felt, Fire Sermon is a moving and gripping novel of the emotions. -- Rupert Thompson author of Katherine Carlyle It's rare, to the point of near non-existence, to find a book that has such literary weight and heft, yet reads like a sonnet. I look at it in puzzlement, wondering how Jamie Quatro gives such breadth, depth, and intensity in so few words. And it's funny, and real, and painful, so painful. Also a shot of light. An education. A mirror. Terrifying. -- Samantha Harvey, author of The Wilderness and Dear Thief A brilliant new voice in American fiction has arrived. Bright, sharp, startling, utterly distinctive, passionate, and secretive, Jamie Quatro's stories are missives from deep within the landscape of American womanhood. They take you by the heart and throat, shake you awake, and ask you to ponder the mysteries of love, parenthood, and marriage. She has earned a place alongside Amy Hempel, Lydia Davis, and Alice Munro. -- David Means Haunting and sharp . . . [reminiscent] of the dark-meets-light style of Lydia Davis or Alice Munro-but it leaves room for zingers, too. Quatro is so good * Elle * A dogged, brutally thoughtful piece of work, and gives us a writer of great originality and apparent artistic maturity who seems to have come out of nowhere ... Strange, thrilling, and disarmingly honest. * New York Times Book Review * Subtle, sexy, and reflective . . . There's so much in these stories that's shocking. Yet there's so much solace. -- Dwight Garner * The New York Times * The best stories in Jamie Quatro's first collection, I Want to Show You More, are about adultery. They are passionate, sensuous, savagely intense, and remarkable for their brave dualism. . . . Moves between carnality and spirit like some franker, modernized Flannery O'Connor tale . . . Quatro has a poet's compound eye [and] fearless lyricism . . . Expansive, joyful, with forgiveness supplanting ruination. -- James Wood * The New Yorker *

Edition details

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1509858563
• ISBN 13: 9781509858569
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 224