The Send-Away Girl
Stories
Will be published approx. on 15. October 2009
Book
Paperback/Softback
216 pages
978-0-8203-3421-9 (ISBN)
Description
Barbara Sutton's quirky debut collection tracks the emotional journeys of characters struggling to find harmonious relationships with the people they are expected to love and be loved by. All too often, for Sutton's characters, such supposedly sacred relationships disappoint. In the end, it is not the loved ones who are loved, but the strangers met through chance encounters-the interim mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, husbands and wives. Such unlikely friendships weave their way through Sutton's stories and create sometimes funny and sometimes tragic reflections on the accidental and often fleeting nature of love.
Through Sutton's vibrant voices we meet a memorable and varied cast of characters, all suffering the same fate. From the adolescent Marta, who finds a substitute for her absent mother and father in her grandmother's improbable and eccentric relationship with the parish priest, to the emotionally unstable, unemployed Virginia Woolf scholar who finds kinship with a belligerent, equally unstable, nine-year-old boy, Sutton delivers authentic scenes of severe isolation coupled with brief moments of resplendent harmony. It is these transitory moments, these glimpses into the elusive world of light, that manage to sustain our hope.
Through Sutton's vibrant voices we meet a memorable and varied cast of characters, all suffering the same fate. From the adolescent Marta, who finds a substitute for her absent mother and father in her grandmother's improbable and eccentric relationship with the parish priest, to the emotionally unstable, unemployed Virginia Woolf scholar who finds kinship with a belligerent, equally unstable, nine-year-old boy, Sutton delivers authentic scenes of severe isolation coupled with brief moments of resplendent harmony. It is these transitory moments, these glimpses into the elusive world of light, that manage to sustain our hope.
Reviews / Votes
Sutton knows how to convey those mysterious transitional moments when the familiar grows suddenly strange. These tightly crafted, tough and true stories show characters 'waiting for fries at the Beckettian drive-through,' struggling with the inescapable strains of daily life, here presented by a writer who knows how to deliver the goods. -- Askold Melnyczuk * author of <i>Ambassador of the Dead</i> * From the opening pages of Barbara Sutton's collection I had the exhilarating sense of being in the presence of a remarkable new voice: wicked, pungent, exquisitely intelligent, wildly humorous. And each successive story only served to deepen my admiration for this writer's originality and for her empathy with a startlingly wide range of characters: old and young, drunk and sober, male and female, naive and cynical. The Send-Away Girl is a splendidly accomplished debut. -- Margot Livesey * author of <i>Eva Moves the Furniture</i> * Sutton's 10 tales display an absolutely wild sense of humor, running the gamut from witty erudition to outright silliness. . . . Each story is made vivid by Sutton's fierce intelligence, captivating dialogue, and unique scenarios. . . . Fresh and funny stories. -- Joanna Wilkinson * <i>Booklist</i> (starred review) * The pretext for these stories is to entertain; their subtext is to make readers think. Sutton accomplishes both. -- Glenn Hopp * <i>Salem Press</i> * An extraordinary satisfaction results from encountering an author who writes in a way specific to one's own time and place. The stories in Belmont resident Barbara Sutton's fierce and funny debut collection, The Send-Away Girl, are of the present: the present time, this moment in the modern world, and the present place, Boston. Although her Flannery O'Connor Award-winning collection will certainly appeal to audiences outside Boston, readers in town are in for a particular delight. . . . There are moments when the prose just shines. Sutton finds an undeniable comedy in our darkest sorrows. -- <i>Boston Phoenix</i> Lose yourself in a sensorial field day as Barbara Sutton paints an intricate, picturesque vision of her character's world. Creep behind their eyes and find yourself in a Twilight Zone moment, where somehow you're vacuumed from your futon into the story, then, to your surprise, suddenly plucked from it (how did she do that?). -- <i>Flaunt Magazine</i> Companionship emerges in unexpected places for the characters of Sutton's shining collection of ten short stories, a Flannery O'Connor Award-winning debut that brims with life and wit. . . . The unexpected unites the impressive range of voices in this delightful, imaginative book. Readers who've enjoyed Julie Hecht and Margot Livesey will relish the cool humor of Sutton's debut. -- <i>Publishers Weekly</i> In 'Tra il Devoto et Profano' and especially in the title story, [Barbara Sutton] evokes the lost urban world of Nathanael West, while in others, like 'Risk Merchants,' she wryly demonstrates how times-and fiction-have changed. . . . Sutton's fiction is about impermanence and abandonment, and at her best, in a story like 'Rabbit Punch,' she enlivens these themes with a gutsy combination of pathos and personal terror. -- <i>New York Times Book Review</i>More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Georgia
United States
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Dimensions
Height: 201 mm
Width: 164 mm
Thickness: 16 mm
Weight
254 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-8203-3421-9 (9780820334219)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
BARBARA SUTTON is the author of The Send-Away Girl, which won the 2003 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. Her stories have appeared in Agni, The Missouri Review, The Antioch Review, The Chicago Quarterly Review, The Harvard Review, Image, and other publications. She works as a government speechwriter in New York City and blogs at Sketches by Baz [https: //sketchesbybaz.com].