Throw Like A Girl
Stories
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A New York Times Notable Book | San Francisco Chronical Best Book of the Year
A master of short fiction whose "best pieces are as good as it gets in contemporary fiction" (Newsday) returns, as Jean Thompson follows her National Book Award finalist collection Who Do You Love with Throw Like a Girl.
Here are twelve new stories that take dead aim at the secrets of womanhood, arcing from youth to experience. Each one of Thompson's indelible characters—lovers, wives, friends, and mothers—speaks her piece—wry, angry, hopeful—about the world and women's places in it.
This collection includes the following short stories:
“The Brat”
“The Five Senses”
“It Would Not Make Me Tremble to See Ten Thousand Fall”
“The Family Barcus”
“Lost”
“The Inside Passage”
“Holy Week”
“A Normal Life”
“Hunger”
“The Woman Taken in Adultery”
“Pie of the Month”
“Throw Like a Girl”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The women protagonists of Thompson's hard-hitting latest collection of stories (The Gasoline Wars; 1999 NBA finalist Who Do You Love) have, like the young army wife of "It Would Not Make Me Tremble to See Ten Thousand Fall," secret plans to wrest control of their life from husbands, boyfriends and mothers. Kelly Ann Pardee, a high school dropout stuck at home with a child while her army grunt husband is sent to the Middle East, wants to be a warrior, too. The teenage Jessie in "The Five Senses" has run off to Florida with an older man she is beginning to realize is violent and scary, and yet she is disappointed that her new fugitive existence isn't more exciting than her upper-middle-class life. Older women in these stories have been through the mill of marriage, adultery, child-rearing. Mid-40s Melanie of "A Normal Life" marries Chad after a long affair, only to wonder if this new version of her lover is one she wants. In "Holy Week," seething sales agent Olivia Snow is too worn down by her job and single mom drudgery to upgrade her "subemployed musician" boyfriend or realize how at risk her 17-year-old daughter is. Thompson's talent is on full display.
