"Amy Hempel is a short story artist. Since Reasons to Live in 1985, her work has warranted veneration alongside the likes of Alice Munro, George Saunders, and Lydia Davis, and the stories in Sing to It are no exception. Deft, playful, and quietly devastating, they are so perfectly designed and constructed that perhaps “short story architect" would be the better term. Without a false note or a wasted word, Hempel takes the faceless stranger on the bus and strips them down to their humanity. Reading this book is like peering through your neighbor’s living room window on a Thursday evening—all they’re doing is watching TV and brushing the dog, but somehow that simple, private moment tells you everything."
Publisher Scribner
Publication Date 2019-03-26
Section New Hardcover - Fiction / All Staff Suggestions / Fiction Suggestions / Serena L.
Format Hardcover
ISBN 9781982109110
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 husband’s 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 Hempel’s singular, startling, inimitable sentences.
