Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket
Stories
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- € 9,99
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- € 9,99
Beschrijving uitgever
A TIME 'New Books You Should Read'
A People magazine 'Book of the Week'
A New York Times Editors' Choice
With a foreword by Elizabeth Strout
'Electric: with wit, with rage, with grief, with the kind of prose that makes you both laugh and thrill to the darker, spikier emotions just barely visible under the bright surface. What a wonderful collection of stories' Lauren Groff
Another day! And then another and another and another. It seemed as if it would all go on forever in that exquisitely boring and beautiful way. But of course it wouldn't; everyone knows that.
In this collection, Hilma Wolitzer invites us inside the private world of domestic bliss, seen mostly through the lens of Paulie and Howard's gloriously ordinary marriage.
From hasty weddings to meddlesome neighbours, ex-wives who just won't leave, to sleepless nights spent worrying about unanswered chainmail, Wolitzer captures the tensions, contradictions and unexpected detours of daily life with wit, candour and an acutely observant eye.
Including stories first published in magazines in the 1960s and 1970s – alongside new writing from Wolitzer, now in her nineties – Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket reintroduces a beloved writer to be embraced by a new generation of readers.
'A fascinating time capsule of womanhood, marriage and motherhood over the last century … A fabulous book' Emma Straub
'Immensely gratifying, poignant, funny … Breathtaking' Elizabeth Strout, from the foreword
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this sage collection of stories, many of which were published in the 1960s and '70s, Wolitzer (An Available Man) considers love, marriage, and motherhood. The title story is narrated by a woman who regrets her inability to help when she sees a woman with two children having a nervous breakdown in a supermarket. In "Mrs. X," a housewife receives a note signed from an "anonymous friend" hinting that her husband is having an affair and grows angry at the friend for interfering in their lives. In "Overtime," a husband and wife allow the former's needy ex to move in with them temporarily—with unsurprisingly uproarious results. In the affecting "Mother," a woman who has just given birth worries that something is wrong with her premature baby and leaves the maternity ward to search the hospital for her. Several of the stories revolve around a New York couple, Paulette and Howard; in a contemporary story, the couple must cope with the coronavirus pandemic: "We were going to have a Zoom meeting, whatever that was," Paulette narrates about a March 2020 book club meeting, her memories undercut with a wistfulness over the devastation that would come in the months to follow. Throughout, Wolitzer captures the feel of each moment with characters who charm with their honesty. The result is a set of engaging time capsules. This review has been updated to more accurately reflect the plot of the story "Mrs. X."
