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Stories
by Katherine Heiny
Single, Carefree, Mellow is that rare and wonderful thing: a debut that is superbly accomplished, endlessly entertaining, and laugh-out-loud funny.
Maya is in love with both her boyfriend and her boss. Sadie's lover calls her as he drives to meet his wife at marriage counseling. Gwen pines for her roommate, a man who will hold her hand but then tells her that her palm is sweaty. And Sasha agrees to have a drink with her married lover's wife and then immediately regrets it. These are the women of Single, Carefree, Mellow, and in these eleven sublime stories they are grappling with unwelcome houseguests, disastrous birthday parties, needy but loyal friends, and all manner of love, secrets, and betrayal.
In "Cranberry Relish" Josie's ex - a man she met on Facebook - has a new girlfriend he found on Twitter. In "Blue Heron Bridge" Nina is more worried that the Presbyterian minister living in her garage will hear her kids swearing than about his finding out that she's sleeping with her running partner. And in "The Rhett Butlers" a teenager loses her virginity to her history teacher and then outgrows him.
In snappy, glittering prose that is both utterly hilarious and achingly poignant, Katherine Heiny chronicles the ways in which we are unfaithful to each other, both willfully and unwittingly. Maya, who appears in the title story and again in various states of love, forms the spine of this linked collection, and shows us through her moments of pleasure, loss, deceit, and kindness just how fickle the human heart can be.
"Starred Review. An exceptionally humorous collection by a talented new writer." - Library Journal
"Starred Review. These young women are sympathetic and slyly seductive, sometimes selfish and maddeningly un-self-aware, but they are beguilingly human, and readers will yield to their charms." - Kirkus
"Dissatisfied teenagers and bored housewives, clueless boyfriends and cuckolded husbands, and 11 variations on the recurrent theme of infidelity and its fallout populate Heiny's first collection of stories." - Publishers Weekly
"Formed of ten exquisitely-composed stories (all featuring women in various states of love), Heiny's book takes a disarming and wry look at the inherent nature of betrayal and secrets within relationships." - Elle UK
"Not since Laurie Colwin has a writer so poignantly and wittily depicted the joys of infidelity. Katherine Heiny knows the secret: happy marriages make for happy affairs. Also happy readers." - Susan Rieger, author of The Divorce Papers
This information about Single, Carefree, Mellow was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Katherine Heiny's fiction has been published in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Narrative, Glimmer Train, and many other places. She lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband and children. This is her first book.
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Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes.
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