She Loves Me Not
New and Selected Stories
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
“Beautifully crafted stories from one of our most honored authors” (The New York Times), Ron Hansen’s She Loves Me Not is an acclaimed collection of stunning fiction, three decades in the writing.
Ron Hansen has long been celebrated as a master of both the novel and the short form. His stories have been called “extraordinary” (The New York Times Book Review) and “wise and smart” (The Washington Post).
In She Loves Me Not, the subjects of Hansen’s scrutiny range from Oscar Wilde to murder to dementia to romance, and display Hansen at his storytelling best: These are “unforgettable stories, each utterly different from the one before….This is writing that slows the breathing” (San Francisco Chronicle). Readers will thrill to Hansen’s masterful attention to the smallest and most telling details, even as he plunges straight into the deepest recesses of desire, love, fury, and loss. Magisterial in its scope and surprising in its variety, She Loves Me Not shows an author at the height of his powers and confirms Hansen’s place as a major American writer. This breathtaking collection “should put him on the short-story map” (USA TODAY).
She Loves Me Not contains an excerpt from Hansen’s new novel, The Kid, to be published in fall, 2016.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hansen (The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford) is best known for historical novels so well researched and faithful to recorded fact that they're barely fiction at all and at first glance the stories collected here stick to the formula. In "Wilde in Omaha," Oscar drops choice rejoinders on his American tour; the Polish priest of "My Communist" flees the cold war for sunny Palo Alto; "The Governess" and "The Killers" are knowing take-offs on Henry James and Ernest Hemingway. But in this edition, which draws on Hansen's 1988 collection Nebraska, we're treated to the full range of the author's Midwestern pathos, from the fast-talking gear heads of "Mechanics" and the shocking cattle mutilations in "True Romance" to the title story's unattainable showgirl, who presides over a grisly murder. Then there are the really strange pieces, like the prose poem "Crazy" and the masterful, sweeping "Nebraska," as poetic a portrait of place as you are likely to read. Hansen turns out to be at his best when he's free from the tent poles of plot, precedent, or even character. He deserves a collection like this to give readers the full vent of the desolation that lurches out of his landscapes and blows like a cold wind into the lives of his hapless Americans.
