Madonna on Her Back

Accomplished stories of daring intention by the author of Scribe and Boleto

The twin standards of human love and human sexuality, separate but reflective of one another, and indissolubly linked, run like the double helix through Alyson Hagy’s debut story collection, Madonna on Her Back, first published in 1986. Her characters stand convicted of humanity, futile and grand, ripe for disaster and ready for glory. In each of these eight stories, Hagy leads her reader into another field of the human spirit, in locales that vary from the rural south to Michigan to West Africa. She reveals how the rituals of human affection are as mannered, grotesque, silly, and appealing as those of wading birds, and only marginally less predictable in their result.

“This first collection by a winner of the Hopwood Award for Short Fiction consists of eight finely crafted and intensely realized stories about people, often women alone or deprived, who must find outlets not only for their sexuality but also for their very being. . . . Hagy gives voice and texture to the passionate intensity with which often dreamy characters face the daily business of their lives.”—Publishers Weekly