Guilty Parties: Tales of Infatuation and Menace

Small dreams can damn as much as full-blown nightmares, as proven in the short stories Laura Argiri has written in her debut collection, Guilty Parties. Small town life can host the bitterest gossip, and and small-minded folk can offer the cruelest taunts and regrettable deeds. A mother dwells on how broken her only daughter is, and whether her grandchild is all the crueler for it. A man's obsession with bettering his lot in life to impress a woman develops a fascination instead for poisonous snakes. A young wife is confronted by her husband's former boarding school roommate, a demented man whose misogyny has convinced him that she tore a rightful pairing apart. And literary agent lives for decades thinking that she caused a college classmate's suicide, then encounters the woman at a party.

Laura Argiri wrote The God in Flight, Random House 1995, published in paperback by Viking Penguin, May 1996, and in its second edition by Lethe Press in 2016. The God is about love, and Guilty Parties is about guilt, from the perspectives of perpetrators, their targets, and an occasional innocent witness or two. She does not encourage people to tell her the worst things they've ever done, but many do, as if they expected her to make use of them. And so she has.