House Gone Quiet
Stories
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4.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence | Named a Best Book of 2023 by Library Journal and Debutiful
An eerie, irresistible debut story collection about the bonds and bounds of community and what it means to call a place home, “perfect for readers of Margaret Atwood and Carmen Maria Machado” (Booklist).
“A writer to watch if there ever was one.” —Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, author of Chain-Gang All-Stars
“Kelsey Norris’s carefully and beautifully crafted tales left me laughing, gasping, and completely enthralled.” —Deesha Philyaw, author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies
A group of women contemplate violence after they’re sent into foreign territory to make husbands of the enemy. A support network of traumatized joggers meets to discuss the bodies they’ve found on their runs. And a town replaces its Confederate monument with a rotating cast of local residents. Slippery but muscular, sly but electric, this stunning debut collection moves from horror to magical realism to satire with total authority. In these stories, characters build and remake their sense of home, be it with one another or within themselves.
As in the very best collections, each of these stories is a world all its own, with a novel’s emotional heft and a poem’s laser focus on the most achingly resonant details of its characters’ lives. Captivating from start to finish, House Gone Quiet announces the arrival of a thrilling literary talent.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Norris's skillful debut collection evokes an atmosphere of foreboding across a wide variety of situations. In "The Sound of Women Waiting," set in an unnamed war-torn country and made eerie by its nondescript location, narrator Satya struggles to survive in enemy territory, where she and other imprisoned women are forced into marriages with local men, while other captives descend into thievery and murder. The frothy "Air Shifts" revolves around a call-in show called The Talk with Tabitha, where DJs Jack and Bubba toss out cavalier advice and one-liners. When one caller suspects her husband is having an affair with the mother of their son's T-ball teammate, Bubba responds, "Catfight at the T-ball field!" After a longtime caller asks for sex advice, host Tabitha blithely declares, "You're my family. We're all in this together," without addressing the problem. The heroine of the standout story "Go Way Back" drives across several states with her boyfriend Carter and into the increasingly scary and unfamiliar domain of his parents. Though the reader will usually sense where Norris is headed, the details are spot on. This bears the mark of an assured writer.
