Emergency: Stories
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3.3 • 4 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
One of The New Yorker's Best Books of 2023 • One of LitHub's 38 Best Books We read in 2023
"Best short stories for an instant escape."—Oprah Daily
From an “exquisite” (The New Yorker) writer, a searing volume of prizewinning stories starring women facing points of no return.
A professor finds a photograph of her deceased mother in a compromising position on the wall of a museum. A twenty-something’s lucrative remote work sparks paranoia and bigotry. A transplant to a new city must make a choice about who she trusts when her partner reveals a violent history. The summer after her divorce from an older man, an exiled painter’s former friends grapple with rumors that she attempted to pass as a teenager.
In this long-awaited debut collection, Kathleen Alcott turns her skills as a stylist on the unfreedoms of American life—as well as the guilt that stalks those who survive them. Emergency roams from European cities to scorched California towns, drug-smeared motel rooms to polished dinner parties, taking taut, surprising portraits of addiction, love, misogyny, and sexual power. Confronting the hidden perils of class ascension, the women in these stories try to pay down the psychic debts of their old lives as they search for a new happiness they can afford.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Most of the stories in this stylish collection from novelist Alcott (America Was Hard to Find) follow women in upheaval. In "Part of the Country," a wife ends a pregnancy much desired by her husband and moves alone to rural California, where her nights are disturbed by the "menacing" wailing of a dog. "Reputation Management" follows tech worker Alice, who scrubs the internet of negative references to her company's clients. After Alice learns a pedophile has availed himself of her services, she has a crisis of conscience. In the title story, one of the strongest in the collection, a chorus of narrators tell the tale of their erstwhile neighbor, Helen, who decamps from New York City after a divorce; in Maine, her idyllic existence raising chickens and swimming in a local river is cut short after she violates a taboo. Another standout, "A World Without Men," the only story to feature a male protagonist, involves 70-something husband-and-wife nightclub performers Frankie and Shirley, whose work is curtailed by the Covid-19 pandemic. Shirley assures Frankie they'll be back at it soon, "Before you can say bored," but before long they're both struggling. Alcott's prose is precise and evocative, and the plots are consistently tight. There's much to enjoy.
