Love Like That
Stories
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Named a Best New Book of 2021 by Vogue and Refinery29
Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2021 by Lit Hub
Named one of "5 Hot Books" by The National Book Review
Longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for a Debut Short Story Collection
"For a friend who needs a reminder that love is weird, humans are complicated, and bad things often get better or at least later become funny stories to tell our friends." —Vanity Fair
A sharp, witty book about brilliant, broken women that are just the right amount wrong.
Whether diving into complicated relationships or wrestling with family ties, the girls and women who populate this collection—misfits and misanthropes, bickering sisters, responsible daughters, and unhappy wives—don't always find themselves making the best decisions.
A woman struggles with a new kind of love triangle when she moves in with a divorced dad. A lonely teenage beach attendant finds uneasy comradeship with her boss. A high school English teacher gets pushed to her limits when a student plagiarizes. Often caught between desire and duty, guilt and resentment, these characters discover what it means to get lost in love, and do what it takes to find themselves again.
Utterly singular and wholly unforgettable, Emma Duffy-Comparone's stories manage to be slyly, wickedly funny at even their darkest turns and herald the arrival of an irreverent and dazzling new voice.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Duffy-Comparone gives voice to a wide range of women and girls leading hardscrabble lives in her bold debut collection. In "The Zen Thing," Anita, 23, endures her family's eccentricities during an annual beach vacation with her older art professor turned boyfriend in tow. Here, as in all the stories, the prose packs a punch: "The narrative of an affair much more reasonable than the living of it, which is, when you get right down to it, a clusterfuck," Anita reflects. "Marvel Sands" is an exquisite story of 15-year-old Ann's sexual awakening after she takes a job to escape living in the cramped apartment of her mom's boyfriend, Ronny, "one side of a defeated-looking duplex." In "The Package Deal," the author blazes through the labyrinthine terrain of step-motherhood as a woman develops a relationship with a divorced man and his difficult eight-year-old son. In the marvelous title story, a woman upends her life to care for her hapless brother. Duffy-Comparone nails her characters in a mere few words (when Anita's mother gets hot flashes, she yanks her bra from her sleeve "like a rabbit from a hat"), often placing them in a realistically oppressive atmosphere (Ronny, according to Ann, wears "hostile cologne" along with his netted sports jerseys). Heartrending prose and a sprinkling of humor make this one a winner.
