Show Don't Tell
From the Sunday Times bestselling author of Romantic Comedy
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4.0 • 7 Ratings
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
YOUR NEXT READ FROM THE INSTANT SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR of ROMANTIC COMEDY, PREP and AMERICAN WIFE
'Messy and delicious' New York Times Editor's Choice
'Sittenfeld is in a league of her own' Guardian
'One of my favourite authors' KATE ATKINSON, author of Death at the Sign of the Rook
'Anything Sittenfeld writes, we'll read' People
'She understands women so well; like having someone look straight into your soul' Reader review*****
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Razor-sharp, glittering tales exploring marriage, fame and female friendship, from the Sunday Times bestselling author.
In this compulsive collection of twelve witty stories, Sittenfeld shows why she’s as beloved for her short fiction as she is for her novels, as she conjures up characters so real that they seem like old friends.
In ‘The Patron Saints of Middle Age,’ a woman visits two friends she hasn’t seen since her divorce. In ‘A for Alone,’ a married artist embarks on a project intended to disprove the so-called Mike Pence Rule, which suggests that women and men can’t spend time alone together without lusting after each other. And in ‘Lost but Not Forgotten,’ Sittenfeld gives readers of her novel Prep a new window into the world of her beloved character Lee Fiora, decades later, when Lee attends an awkward school reunion.
Witty, confronting and full of tenderness, Sittenfeld peels back layer after layer of our inner lives, keeping us riveted to the page with her utterly distinctive voice.
READERS CAN'T GET ENOUGH OF CURTIS SITTENFELD:
'Small windows into modern life and as such highly entertaining. Curtis, you're a star!' *****
'Sittenfeld understands women so well, it’s like having someone look straight into your soul'*****
'Devoured! You'll recognise yourself and others in these pages' *****
'No-one else writes with such precision and amusement' Red Magazine
Customer Reviews
Middle ground
3.5 stars
Elizabeth Curtis Sittenfeld is a critically acclaimed and best-selling American novelist and short story writer, who exploded onto the literary scene with Prep (2005), a partially autobiographical novel about the trials and tribulations of a lower middle/working class WF from the midwest (South Bend IN) who wins a scholarship to an exclusive New England prep school. Ms S hails from Cincinnati OH, was middle to upper middle class, and went to Groton (followed by Vassar, Stanford and the Iowa Writers Workshop).
She’s published six more novels since, including a reworking of Pride snd Prejudice and an alternative history of Hillary Rodham Clinton, along with two short fiction collections of which this is the most recent. I say most recent rather than latest because some the stories here are ten years old and most have been published elsewhere (The New Yorker etc)
Given that Ms S turns 50 this year, it is probably not surprising that most of her protagonists are middle-aged, white middle class, college-educated women living in the midwest. The sole male protagonist in the collection could easily be rewritten as female (no surgery or hormones necessary).
The final story featuring Lee Fiora, the protagonist of Prep, going to her 30-year high school reunion was unnecessary IMO.
Themes include relationships (both marital and friend), fame, ambition, the pursuit of meaning in life, balancing societal norms vs personal goals, yada, yada. Not that there’s anything wrong with those, I suppose, other than it all feels a bit same-ish after a while. I liked her previous collection You Think It, I’ll Say It (2018) better.
The things that make Sittenfeld worth reading are her effortless prose, underlying wit, and command of dialogue which, combined with the aforementioned juxtaposition between societal norms and personal ones make her modern day Jane Austen of sorts IMO, although individual mileage may vary (e.g., if you’re not middle class and white.)