Requirements: .ePUB reader, 697kb
Overview: In these dense and startling stories, Maya Sonenberg telescopes seasons, decades, and generations in candid depictions of women’s family lives.
What happens when the urge to ditch your family outpaces the desire to love them? The stories in Bad Mothers, Bad Daughters, winner of the Richard Sullivan Prize in Short Fiction, attempt to answer this question, heading straight for the messiness of domestic relationships and the constraints society places on women as they navigate their obligations. Daughters desert their rheumy-eyed elders in dusty museums, steal a mother’s favorite teacup, or consider throwing their dead parents’ nostalgia-riddled belongings out the window. Mothers conclude that they love one child more than their others. Fathers puzzle over a wife’s inability to balance family and career or accuse a partner of blaming their child for her own misdeeds. Women mourn the children they decided not to have and fret over the legacy they’ll leave the children they do have. But sometimes the generations reconcile or siblings manage to rescue each other. Love tears these people apart, but it mends them too.
The emotions expressed in these stories are combustible, both fraught and nuanced, uncontrollable and common, but above all often ignored or hushed because we’re not supposed to be bored by our children or annoyed with our aged parents, even as we love them. The careful shapes of these stories adapted from fairy tales, verse, letters, or newspaper announcements, the surprise of their wordplay, and the blaze of their lyrical sentences allow them to dig into and contain all those messy emotions at the same time. In these works, constraint creates both understanding and fire.
Genre: Fiction > General Fiction/Classics > Short Stories
Included :
- Childhood
Pink Seascape
Dark Season
Four Phoebes
Moon Child
Seventh
The Cathedral Is a Mouth
Return of the Media Five
The Other Road
Painting Time
Hunters and Gatherers
The Arches, Our Home
Six Views of Seattle
Annunciation
Disintegration
Visitation
On Seeing the Skeleton of a Whale in the Harvard Museum of Natural History
Princess of Desire
Bad Mother: A Story in Five Paragraphs
Seven Little Stories about 1977
Last Week, New Year
Inebriate of Air
Forest
Download Instructions:
https://ouo.io/eVNkcMO
https://ouo.io/henRHgI.
