Half-Lives
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- $23.99
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- $23.99
Publisher Description
A playful debut short story collection imagining women’s lives in a world free of social limitations.
Amid heightened restrictions about what women can and cannot do with their bodies, Lynn Schmeidler’s debut short story collection, Half-Lives, is a humane, absurd, and timely collection of narratives centering on women’s bodies and psyches. Playful and experimental, these sixteen stories explore girlhood, sexuality, motherhood, identity, and aging in a world where structures of societal norms, narrative, gender, and sometimes even physics do not apply. The protagonists grapple with the roles they choose and with those that are thrust upon them as they navigate their ever-evolving emotional lives. A woman lists her vagina on Airbnb, Sleeping Beauty is a yoga teacher who lies in state on the dais of her mother’s studio, and a museum intern writes a confession of her affair in the form of a hijacked museum audio guide.
Half-Lives is the 2023 Rising Writer Prize winner, selected by Matt Bell.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Schmeidler's entertaining and farcical debut collection features darkly humorous stories about women's bodies and sexuality. In the aptly named "Sex Was Everywhere," a sixth grader senses sexual energy in nearly everything she comes across: the scent of deodorant, the taste of mints, even the "heat that gathered under the ceiling of the gym" during rope-climbing exercises. Arriving alongside her sexual awareness is a newfound fear, as she imagines a serial killer lurking wherever she goes. The narrator of "Corpse Pose," a recently deceased 25-year-old single woman, thinks her mother must be relieved that she is dead, now that she is free from the agony of blind dates, the cost of therapy, and her endless obsession with her body. In "The Future Was Vagina Forward," a woman lists her vagina for rent on Airbnb and receives myriad questions ranging from her cleaning policies to whether children and pets are allowed (they're not). Her first guest leaves a rave review, remarking on her vagina's "soft, warm soundproof curtains." After consulting a tax lawyer, she begins writing off household expenses. The narrator playfully acknowledges that her vagina is a "metaphor but also a real thing," and the author skillfully skirts the line here and elsewhere between fabulism and realism. Schmeidler's offbeat tales are wonderfully bizarre.
