Ether
Seven Stories and a Novella
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
In "Leavers' Events," a teenage girl awaits exam results and has a sexual encounter with a teacher that she hopes will define her. In "Sunday's Child," a middle-aged actress evicts a homeless woman from her garden, which precipitates a crisis of conscience. In "The Bachelor's Table," a lawyer takes advantage of an accounting mistake and sets in motion a sequence of events that force him to evaluate his actions. In the title story, "Ether," a blocked writer plagiarizes his own life with devastating consequences.
All the characters in Evgenia Citkowitz's first collection of short fiction are connected by the quest for identity. Some are poised at a crossroads, while others teeter on the edge of a moral precipice. The stories are startlingly original, haunting, and often funny. From a hamster cage in Los Angeles to the bowels of the great houses of London and Long Island, Citkowitz depicts her characters' frailties and humanity with a mordant humor and tenderness that never diminish their complexity.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Screenwriter Citkowitz maps the territory where false starts and disappointment sometimes lead to unexpected opportunities in her debut collection of capricious stories and a disturbing novella. The title novella follows William, a frustrated writer who abandons New York for L.A. and falls in love with gorgeous actress Madeline. Their quick marriage inspires him to begin work on an autobiographical novel, but when Madeline develops a mysterious illness and befriends a strange young man (William calls him the Psycho ), his attraction to her sours and his writing takes a dark turn. In The Bachelor's Table, Jonathan Edel, a new father, buys an unwieldy antique table on a nostalgic whim, and its presence through an uncomfortable Christmas with his alcoholic mother-in-law forces him to confront old regrets and feelings of inadequacy. An aging actress adopts a troubled boy in Sunday's Child, and the challenges they both encounter at school, at home come to an unexpected head when a young homeless woman is found sleeping in the boy's backyard playhouse. For all the uncomfortable situations and prickly emotion, the pieces are remarkably easy to digest.
