All Fall Down

Enthralling stories of desire and dissolution from “one of our great national literary treasures.”

In this long-awaited collection which includes two novellas and four shorter tales of love and healing gone awry, we meet caregivers and lovers, muses and skydivers, mothers and minors—all headed toward “ninety mile-an-hour psychic crashes euphemistically referred to as epiphanies.” As William Gass says, “The music of Mary Caponegro’s stories is to the mouth what wine is.” Through exuberant lyricism, remarkable characterization, and settings as elaborately detailed as any in Hollywood, these dramas of failure, resilience, and transformation linger long after the wine is gone.

Mary Caponegro is the author of The Star Café, The Complexities of Intimacy, and All Fall Down, among other collections of short fiction. Her stories have been anthologized in The Anchor Book of New American Fiction, The Italian American Reader, and Wild Dreams: The Best of Italian Americana. Born in Brooklyn, she has lived in Italy, and now resides in New York’s Hudson Valley, where she is currently the Richard B. Fisher Family Professor in Literature and Writing at Bard College and contributing editor of Conjunctions.