Newlyweds Jack and Chloe are building a life together in a modest Chicago apartment. The city is theirs to enjoy as Jack struggles to pursue a writing career and Chloe works downtown, applying herself to the world of high finance. While Jack aspires to be the perfect husband, his own self-doubts ...
A master of short fiction whose "best pieces are as good as it gets in contemporary cction" (Newsday) returns, as Jean Thompson follows her National Book Award finalist collection Who Do You Love with Throw Like a Girl. Here are twelve new stories that take dead aim at the secrets of womanhood...
Bert was a hurricane. He made landfall along the south Texas coast and pooped out. Cindy stayed out in the Atlantic, past Bermuda. None of them anything to write home about. But low-pressure masses kept firing themselves from the Cape Verde Islands, from the coast of Africa, like baseballs. An oc...
Now her mom and Jay were married and they talked about their “practice marriages,” and this was terribly funny. Jay and Angela had a daughter named Megan. Linnea’s mom and her dad had Linnea. Linnea’s mom and Jay had Max, who was still a little kid and unable to appreciate...
It was cold enough for the car windows to steam over and he rubbed a section of glass every so often to clear it. The house was a single-story brick ranch, a design so ordinary and utilitarian that even if you had not been inside it, as Massey had not, you knew its components. Three bedrooms, two...
They stood in the parking lot behind Bonnie’s apartment, saying good-bye. They were always saying good-bye. Most often they did so indoors, to avoid the extra scrutiny of Bonnie’s neighbors, even though the Dumplings, certainly, and Mr. Hopkins, most likely, knew what was what. It was just easier...