Certain American States, Catherine Lacey
Certain American States, Catherine Lacey
List: $16.95 | Sale: $11.87
Club: $8.47

Certain American States
Stories

Author: Catherine Lacey

Narrator: Lisa Flanagan, Thérèse Plummer, Alex Karpovsky

Unabridged: 5 hr 38 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 08/07/2018

Categories: Fiction, Short Stories

Synopsis

From one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists comes Certain American States, whose insightful and lonely stories beg you to discover the emotional universes hiding at their cores.The winner of a Whiting Award, Catherine Lacey brings her narrative mastery to Certain American States, her first collection of short stories. As with her acclaimed novels Nobody Is Ever Missing and The Answers, she gives life to a group of subtly complex, instantly memorable characters whose searches for love, struggles with grief, and tentative journeys into the minutiae of the human condition are simultaneously gripping and devastating. The characters in Certain American States are continually coming to terms with their place in the world, and how to adapt to that place, before change inevitably returns. A woman leaves her dead husband’s clothing on the street, only for it to reappear on the body of a stranger; a man reads his ex-wife’s short story and neurotically contemplates whether it is about him; a young woman whose Texan mother insists on moving to New York City with her has her daily attempts to get over a family tragedy interrupted by a mute stranger showing her incoherent messages on his phone. These are stories of breakups, abandonment, and strained family ties; dead brothers and distant surrogate fathers; loneliness, happenstance, starting over, and learning to let go. Lacey’s elegiac and inspired prose is at its full power in this collection, further establishing her as one of the singular literary voices of her generation.

About Catherine Lacey

Catherine Lacey is the author of the novels Nobody Is Ever Missing, The Answers, and Pew and the short story collection Certain American States. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, and a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship. She has been a finalist for the Dylan Thomas Prize and the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and was named one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, the New York Times, The Believer, and elsewhere

About Lisa Flanagan

Lisa Flanagan is a classically trained soprano, comedian, voice-over artist, and Earphones Award–winning narrator.

About Thérèse Plummer

Thérèse Plummer is an actor, award-winning voice-over artist, and counselor. She has won eighteen AudioFile Earphones Awards and has been a finalist for the prestigious Audie Award for best narration. She has appeared in a variety of television and film roles. As a counselor for adolescents, she spent five years using drama therapy techniques in individual and group settings.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Thomas

Another reviewer described this collection as “artisanal false poignancy” which resonated with me regarding Certain American States. At times I felt that Catherine Lacey could capture a singular emotion – like a character’s ennui, or disconnection from their parent, or desire to move somewhere else.......more

Goodreads review by Doug

3.5, rounded up. Standard disclaimer on short story collections: those are not my particular reading forte, so I am always a bit disgruntled, as I always find them lacking and leaving me wanting more, and they are by default, uneven, with some stories working more successfully than others. That said,......more

Quotes

"[A] collection of stories rife with sentences whose length and detached style…evoke emotions and encourage thinking and reflection.” Vanity Fair

“On every page, she slips a tiny gem into your palm, a little miracle of perspective…[with] perfect sentences, penetrating insights, devastating epiphanies.” Chicago Tribune

“In these stories of loneliness and despair, grief and searching are threads of something more hopeful…the possibility of finding ourselves.” Nylon

“Peopled by widows, ex-wives, New York City transplants, and more, the stories in Certain American States find their characters at the crux of change and dare to probe their psyches as much as their surroundings.” Literary Hub

“Filled with affecting emotional complexity just at the point of bursting.” Booklist

“Stellar…On display is Lacey’s trademark handle on the plight of characters who feel lost in their own lives.” Publishers Weekly

“Stories whose protagonists find their sense of finally having found their place in the world suddenly upended, as when a woman who’s left her dead husband’s clothes on the street sees another man wearing them.” Library Journal

“Exquisite: every line is dry and spare and bracing, without a single syllable out of place. A fully realized vision.” Kirkus Reviews

“In leaving things out, Lacey asks her audience what they haven’t been noticing, where their empathy has failed to travel. To read “Please Take” or any other in her magnificent new collection, Certain American States, is a whole childhood of feeling, and like any childhood, we feel lucky after to have emerged intact. You don’t read a Catherine Lacey story—you survive it.” Kathleen Alcott, author of Infinite Home

Awards

  • Vanity Fair Magazine Pick
  • Guardian Pick
  • Nylon Magazine Pick
  • Bustle Pick
  • Literary Hub Pick
Add to Cart
Add to Wish List