"These are necessary stories, which often possess a quality of 
devastating clarity all too infrequent in short fiction. Each is a rare 
entrée into the ordinary everyday world without the added special 
effects of all-consuming tragedy. This collection is prime proof 
that there is nothing, nothing like a collection of short stories to 
offer an almost Cubist perspective on the way women live."—Cynthia 
Shearer

The twelve stories in Kate Blackwell's debut collection illuminate the 
lives of men and women who appear as unremarkable as your next-
door-neighbor until their lives explode quietly on the page. Her wry, 
often darkly funny voice describes the repressed underside of a range 
of middle-class characters living in the South.

"You most definitely WILL remember this extraordinary collection. 
All of Blackwell's finely crafted stories move as easily as an 
overheard conversation about what is too often hushed in the human 
heart."—Robert Bausch

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Born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, KATE BLACKWELL is a 
former journalist. She now writes fiction and teaches writing at The 
Writer's Center in Bethesda, Maryland. Her stories have appeared in 
many venues, including Prairie Schooner, New Letters, and The 
Greensboro Review, as well as in several anthologies. She lives in 
Washington, D.C.



What people are saying about this book

"Kate Blackwell is a wonderful and very perceptive writer who knows 
more about love, and more about loss, than most of us ever will. 
These stories about all sorts of Southern men and women are both 
funny and sad, and always subtly but deeply sympathetic."—Alison 
Lurie

"In these remarkably intelligent and quirky stories Kate Blackwell 
sweeps the reader into a tableau as vivid as a Dutch painting, both 
startling and alive. These are harshly honest and generous stories 
embroidered with humor."—Patricia Griffith

"Throughout this fine first collection, there is a fascinating tension 
between limpid prose and incisive truth. Kate Blackwell tends to deal 
with secrets—an unfulfilled desire, a denied knowledge, a hidden 
love. She writes with especial power and insight about the parts of 
themselves women give up—or bury—when they marry."—Joyce 
Johnson