Daddy, Emma Cline
Daddy, Emma Cline
1 Rating(s)
List: $20.00 | Sale: $14.00
Club: $10.00

Daddy
Stories

Author: Emma Cline

Narrator: Natasha Soudek

Unabridged: 7 hr 21 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 09/01/2020


Synopsis

From the bestselling author of The Girls comes a “brilliant” (The New York Times) story collection exploring the dark corners of human experience.

“Daddy’s ten masterful, provocative stories confirm that Cline is a staggering talent.”—Esquire

NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY

An absentee father collects his son from boarding school after a shocking act of violence. A nanny to a celebrity family hides out in Laurel Canyon in the aftermath of a tabloid scandal. A young woman sells her underwear to strangers. A notorious guest arrives at a placid, not-quite rehab in the Southwest.

In ten remarkable stories, Emma Cline portrays moments when the ordinary is disturbed, when daily life buckles, revealing the perversity and violence pulsing under the surface. She explores characters navigating the edge, the limits of themselves and those around them: power dynamics in families, in relationships, the distance between their true and false selves. They want connection, but what they provoke is often closer to self-sabotage. What are the costs of one’s choices? Of the moments when we act, or fail to act? These complexities are at the heart of Daddy, Emma Cline’s sharp-eyed illumination of the contrary impulses that animate our inner lives.

About Emma Cline

Emma Cline is from California. Her fiction has appeared in Tin House and the Paris Review, and she was the recipient of the Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize for Fiction in 2014.


Reviews

Goodreads review by emma on January 02, 2023

note to self: don't read this one on public transit. doing my usual (when i have the will to live) mini review for each story here! WHAT CAN YOU DO WITH A GENERAL white christmas is my very favorite christmas movie so this does it for me on title alone. also a great story (and perfect title) about men /......more

Goodreads review by Andrew on May 11, 2024

A series of ten short stories by the author of The Girls. - A father frets over his distracted daughter and reflects on life and family during a visit from his grown up children over the Christmas holiday. - An aspiring actress who works in a store selling overpriced clothes sells her own worn underw......more

Goodreads review by persephone ☾ on September 05, 2023

all shame evaporated from my body the day i decided to read this book on the public transportation......more

Goodreads review by Meike on August 05, 2021

I put this down for about five days, and when I picked it up again, I realized that I forgot EVERYTHING about the stories I had already read. Then I read some more (I've skipped two of the ten stories included here) and realized: This is completely forgettable prose about uninteresting characters, m......more

Goodreads review by Katie on June 28, 2021

The Girls for me was more successful as creative writing than a novel. Emma Cline's talent for insightful observation was the standout feature. The same is true in these stories. She has much of interest to say about the world we live in. In each of these stories she sets up a mystery which she does......more


Quotes

Daddy approaches questions about power and connivance from a flurry of different angles. . . . [Cline] comes for the king and she doesn’t miss.”—Los Angeles Times

“Brilliant, dark . . . Cline’s fiction is full of binaries pressing up against one another: youthful promise and life’s realities; success and failure; darkness and humor; external beauty and internal rot.”—Wall Street Journal
 
“Cline is an astonishingly gifted stylist, but it is her piercing understanding of modern humiliation that makes these stories vibrate with life. . . . Brilliant.”—The New York Times
 
“Cline is a master of fiction that wallows in the heavy weight of the unsaid, with perversion and darkness simmering beneath her characters’ tightly controlled surfaces. Daddy’s ten masterful, provocative stories confirm that Cline is a staggering talent.”—Esquire
 
“A hair-raising collection of short fiction that at once discomfits and titillates, delineating the various ways women and men wrestle with the male gaze.”—O Magazine

“Cline’s sharply drawn characters are the cowed, contemplative survivors of self-inflicted trauma, both seismic and quotidian. . . . Cline writes with such grace and precision that every sentence is a joy to absorb.”—LitHub

Daddy is a striking achievement, the assured work of a young writer with talent to burn.”—The Boston Globe
 
“The payoffs are as gratifying as they are shattering.”—Publishers Weekly
 
“Scintillating . . . This is a technically perfect book.”New York
 
“Cline’s stories constitute a riveting, timely tapestry of realizations, motivations, and desires.”—Booklist