Objects of Desire
Stories
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4.2 • 5 Ratings
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
“A debut story collection of the rarest kind ... you wish that every single entry could be an entire novel." —Entertainment Weekly
Fresh, intimate stories of women’s lives from an extraordinary new literary voice, laying bare the unexpected beauty and irony in contemporary life
A college freshman, traveling home, strikesup an odd, ephemeral friendship with the couple next to her on the plane. A mother prepares for her son’s wedding, her own life unraveling as his comes together. A long-lost stepbrother’s visit to New York prompts a family’s reckoning with its old taboos. A wife considers the secrets her marriage once contained. An office worker, exhausted by the ambitions of the men around her, emerges into a gridlocked city one afternoon to make a decision.
In these eleven powerful stories, thrilling desire and melancholic yearning animate women’s lives, from the brink of adulthood to the labyrinthine path between twenty and thirty, to middle age, when certain possibilities quietly elapse. Tender, lucid, and piercingly funny, Objects of Desire is a collection pulsing with subtle drama, rich with unforgettable scenes, and alive with moments of recognition each more startling than the last—a spellbinding debut that announces a major talent.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sestanovich's intelligent debut collection demonstrates a gift for pithy detail that encapsulates the whole of a character's personality or era of lived experience. In the title story, protagonist Leonora is hung up on an ex: "They had exchanged love letters and endured two or three pregnancy scares. Once, they had been accosted at knifepoint. They had gone to funerals together. Most of all, they had fought passionately." In "Annunciation," the passive ennui of recent graduate Iris is juxtaposed against the more definitive, if slightly absurd, lives of others: her married housemates are in a food-oriented polyamorous relationship with another couple; Iris's best friend teaches her "to eat burgers and bagels and bacon—there was nothing as powerful as eating masculine foods with feminine grace." At times, the observations and jokes give way to poignant insights into the characters' psyches: in "Wants and Needs," Val, misinterpreting a facial expression, is "filled with bitterness for all the faces that had refused to reveal themselves to her." The collection finds cohesion around the quiet angst of mostly young, female narrators who long for experiences, other people, and states of being just beyond their grasp. These technically accomplished if not quite revolutionary stories demonstrate a high command of craft.
