Virtual Event: Clare Sestanovich

Harvard Book Store's virtual event series and GrubStreet welcome writer and New Yorker editor CLARE SESTANOVICH for a discussion of her debut story collection, Objects of Desire. She will be joined in conversation by ANNIE BISHAI, Assistant Editor at Knopf and editor of Objects of Desire.

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About Objects of Desire

A college freshman, traveling home, strikes up an odd, ephemeral friendship with the couple next to her on the plane. A mother prepares for her son’s wedding, her own life unraveling as his comes together. A long-lost stepbrother’s visit to New York prompts a family’s reckoning with its old taboos. A wife considers the secrets her marriage once contained. An office worker, exhausted by the ambitions of the men around her, emerges into a gridlocked city one afternoon to make a decision.

In these eleven powerful stories, thrilling desire and melancholic yearning animate women’s lives, from the brink of adulthood to the labyrinthine path between twenty and thirty, to middle age, when certain possibilities quietly elapse. Tender, lucid, and piercingly funny, Objects of Desire is a collection pulsing with subtle drama, rich with unforgettable scenes, and alive with moments of recognition each more startling than the last—a spellbinding debut that announces a major talent.

Praise for Objects of Desire

“Clare Sestanovich’s stories compelled me like gravity, and offered sharp, surprising, singular bursts of grace. Her characters are observed with wry, prism-gazed tenderness; sketched deftly and persuasively with just a few perfect strokes. The details go off like bombs. These stories know strange, important truths about what it feels like to be alive.” —Leslie Jamison, author of The Recovering and The Empathy Exams

“Astonishing—one of the best story collections I’ve read in a long time. The stories in Objects of Desire are subtle and sophisticated, written with sensitive lucidity and warmth; their emotional effects are brought about naturally, almost indirectly, and one leaves each of the stories feeling a little homesick. I feel like I've found a new favorite writer.” —Brandon Taylor, author of the Booker Prize finalist Real Life

“Sestanovich’s elegant prose takes seriously the quiet unrest that can ravage a life, and makes room for the pleasure and discovery that can be found in that ruin.” —Raven Leilani, author of Luster