Virgin and Other Stories
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A confident and mesmerizing fiction debut, from the winner of the Plimpton Prize
Set in the South, at the crossroads of a world that is both secular and devoutly Christian, April Ayers Lawson's stories evoke the inner lives of young women and men navigating sexual, emotional, and spiritual awakenings. In "The Negative Effects of Homeschooling," Conner, sixteen, accompanies his grieving mother to the funeral of her best friend, Charlene, a woman who was once a man. In "The Way You Must Play Always," Gretchen, who looks young even for thirteen, heads into her weekly piano lesson in nervous anticipation of her next illicit meeting with her teacher's brother, Wesley. Thin and sickly, wasting from a brain tumor, Wesley spends his days watching pornography and smoking pot, and yet Gretchen can only interpret his advances as the first budding of love. And in the title story, Jake grapples with the growing chasm between him and his wife, Sheila, who was still a virgin when they wed. At a cocktail party thrown by a wealthy donor to his hospital, he ponders the intertwining imperatives of marriage--sex and love, violation and trust, spirituality and desire--even as he finds himself succumbing to the temptations of his host.
Self-assured and sensual, Virgin and Other Stories is the first work of a young writer of unusual mastery.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The five stories in Lawson's superb debut collection explore youth in extremis, through voices at once elegant in their phrasing and unrestrained in their emotion. In the title story, a young husband suspects his emotionally unavailable wife of infidelity, only to find himself tempted by the same at a society party. "The Way You Must Play Always" recalls the power dynamics of Carson McCullers's "Wunderkind," detailing a teenage piano student's infatuation with her instructor's sickly homebound brother. "Three Friends in a Hammock" measures the growing interpersonal distances among three longtime friends who reunite at a birthday party. A boy wrestles with his mother's complicated relationship with a recently deceased transgender woman in "The Negative Effects of Homeschooling," and, in the collection's longest and most freewheeling story, "Vulnerability," a talented painter contemplates and eventually consummates an affair with a peculiar but charming art dealer. The precision of Lawson's prose brilliantly contrasts with the messy inner lives of her characters. These are stories that dare to tread where they shouldn't, on uncertain ground that feels, in the hands of this talented young writer, remarkably concrete.
