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Stories
by Maggie Shipstead
Book Reviewed by:From the Booker Prize nominee and New York Times bestselling author of Great Circle, a piercing, irresistible first collection of short stories exquisite in their craft and audacious in their range.
A love triangle plays out over decades on a Montana dude ranch. A hurdler and a gymnast spend a single night together in the Olympic village. Mistakes and mysteries weave an intangible web around an old man's deathbed in Paris, connecting disparate destinies. On the slopes of an unfinished ski resort, a young woman searches for her vanished lover. A couple's Romanian honeymoon goes ominously awry, and, in the mesmerizing title story, a former child actress breaks with her life in a Hollywood cult.
In these and other stories, knockout after knockout, Maggie Shipstead delivers another "extraordinary" (New York Times) work of fiction and seals her reputation as a writer of "breathtaking range and skill" (Kirkus Reviews). Rich in imagination and dazzling in its shapeshifting style, You Have a Friend in 10A excavates the complexities of love, sex, and life in ways unsparing and hilarious, sharp-eyed and tender.
Shipstead released three novels before this collection of her stories appeared. However, she had been writing and publishing short stories all along: The 10 in this volume all first appeared in literary magazines or on websites between 2009 and 2017. In the acknowledgments, she reveals, "this book came out of years spent learning to be a writer, a process that will never be complete." In a way, then, reading this book is like following along with an apprenticeship. Perhaps that explains why there is not much in the way of thematic cohesion. She's experimenting with topics and structure here, so there is more variety than continuity...continued
Full Review
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(Reviewed by Rebecca Foster).
Maggie Shipstead was known as a novelist before releasing her first short story collection, You Have a Friend in 10A. A number of its stories date back 10 or more years, though, some having been written while she was a student at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford. The individual stories originally appeared in publications such as Guernica, Tin House and VQR (the Virginia Quarterly Review). So, what goes into the decision to publish a novel or a short story collection first?
For authors, short stories can be a way to practice all the skills that go into novel-writing, such as dialogue, scene-setting, characterization, plotting and the use of voice. A piece can be finished, polished and published ...
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