Hum : Stories

A new collection of stories by bestselling author Michelle Richmond, Hum presents a cautionary political fable, a celebration of the complexities of marriage, and a meditation on modern-day alienation.

Thirteen years after the publication of her first story collection, The Girl in the Fall-Away Dress, New York Times bestselling author Michelle Richmond returns with Hum, a collection of ten stories that examine love, lust, and loyalty from surprising angles.

In “Hum,” a young couple that is paid to live in a house filled with surveillance equipment becomes “quietly lost to each other,” as the wife’s infatuation with the subject of their surveillance turns to obsession. In “Medicine,” a woman grieving over the death of her sister finds her calling as a manual medical caregiver. In “Boulevard,” a couple who has been trying to have a child for seven years finds themselves in an unnamed country at the height of a revolution, summoned there by the enigmatic H. “Scales,” the story of a woman who falls in love with a man whose body is covered with scales, parses the intersection of pain and pleasure. The narrator of “Lake” must choose whether to walk in the footsteps of her famous grandfather, The Great Amphibian, who disappeared while performing a feat of daring in Lake Michigan. What does it mean to be heroic? How much should one sacrifice in the name of love? These questions and more are explored with tenderness, wit, and unerring precision in Hum.

Michelle Richmond is the author of the award-winning story collection The Girl in the Fall-Away Dress, the novels Dream of the Blue Room and No One You Know, and the New York Times and international bestseller The Year of Fog. Her new novel, Golden State, will be published by Bantam in 2014.