Sing to It: New Stories

LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/FAULKER AWARD ONE OF TIMES 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR ONE OF NPRS BEST BOOKS OF 2019 All the tawdry details Im dying for are in these stories, but theyre given out like old sweaters-without shame, without guile. Amy Hempel is the writer who makes me feel most affiliated with other humans; we are all living this way-hiding, alone, obsessed-and thats ok. -Miranda July From legendary writer Amy Hempel, one of the most celebrated and original voices in American short fiction: a ravishing, sometimes heartbreaking new story collection-her first in over a decade. Amy Hempel is a master of the short story. A multiple award winner, Hempel is highly regarded among writers, reviewers, and readers of contemporary fiction. This new collection, her first since her Collected Stories published more than a decade ago, is a literary event. 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, devotedly cares for dogs on a list to be euthanized. In Greed, a spurned wife examines her husbands affair with a glamorous, older married woman. And in Cloudland, the longest story in the collection, 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 Hempels singular, startling, inimitable sentences.