Sing to It

“An essential voice in contemporary American short fiction. . . . at her best: oscillating between hilarity and pain in a way that feels utterly human.” —Time

From award-winning author Amy Hempel: an astounding collection of stories that are “riveting in precision” (The Atlantic) and “scintillating as the blade of a knife” (The Wall Street Journal).

These fifteen exquisitely honed stories reveal Hempel at her most compassionate and spirited, as she introduces characters, lonely and adrift, searching for connection. In “A Full-Service Shelter,” a volunteer at a dog shelter tirelessly cares for dogs on a list to be euthanized. In “Greed,” a spurned wife examines her husband’s affair with a glamorous, older married woman. And in “Cloudland,” a woman reckons with the choice she made as a teenager to give up her newborn infant. Quietly dazzling, these stories are replete with moments of revelation and transcendence and with Hempel’s singular, startling, inimitable sentences.

Ravishing, heartbreaking, and powerfully concise, Sing to It is a “quiet masterpiece by a true American original” (NPR).

“Each purified sentence . . . is itself a story, a kind of suspended enigma. . . . Hempel, like some practical genius of the forest, can make living structures out of what look like mere bric-a-brac, leavings, residue. It’s astonishing how little she needs to get something up and going on the page. A pun, a malapropism, or a ghost rhyme is spark enough.” —James Wood, The New Yorker

“Gorgeously distilled, archly witty, and daringly empathetic tales.” —Booklist

“Characteristically bold, disconcerting, knockout stories.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Hempel packs a lot into her narrow spaces: nuance, longing, love, and loss.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review