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    This Is Not Your City: Stories
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    This Is Not Your City: Stories
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    This Is Not Your City: Stories
    Ebook216 pages3 hours

    This Is Not Your City: Stories

    By Caitlin Horrocks

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    Eleven women confront the everyday, outlandish, and unnerving in a “startlingly ingenious” collection of stories (The Boston Globe).
     
    From the American Midwest to Finland to the coast of Africa, Caitlin Horrocks “deploys love and humor as convincingly as dread” as she explores the dilemmas of wives, mothers, daughters, lovers, and strangers who cut imperfect paths to peace and escape. In personal worlds gone awry, they have no other choice (The New York Times).
     
    A Russian mail-order bride is rendered silent by her dislocation and loss of language; a subversively sadistic biology teacher takes advantage of pupil’s unease; on a cruise ship held hostage by Somali pirates, the mother of a severely disabled boy writes him postcards he'll never read; crime and conscience collide for a professional dog-napper heartened by her lovable new catch; a girl is plagued by unforgiving memories of a cruel game she played on a classmate years ago; and an Iowa actuary wanders among the reincarnations of those she's known in her 127 lives.
     
    In this “achingly observant and witty” (Cleveland Plain Dealer), San Francisco Chronicle Best Book Pick, Caitlin Horrocks delivers “refreshing takes on old themes: childhood meanness, the effects of devastating illness, the desire for a better life, misunderstandings between parents and their children, [and] looking for love in all the wrong places” (Minneapolis Star-Tribune).
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateJun 28, 2011
    ISBN9781936747252
    Author

    Caitlin Horrocks

    Caitlin Horrocks lives in Michigan, by way of Ohio, Arizona, England, Finland, and the Czech Republic. Her stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories 2011, The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2009, The Pushcart Prize XXXV, The Paris Review, Tin House, and The Southern Review. Recently, she won the $10,000 Plimpton Prize from The Paris Review. She teaches at Grand Valley State University.

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    Reviews for This Is Not Your City

    4/5

    17 ratings4 reviews

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    • 4/5
      This Is Not Your City is an itty little book, but packs a punch. I have been having trouble getting into the modern short story of late, but Ms. Horrocks offerings certainly stood their own. Each story gives us a glimpse of a woman lost in her own life. Some are quite conventional in form, while others delve into magical realism and experiment with format in surprisingly moving ways. A couple, such as the title entry, lose themselves in contrivance, but as a whole we have here some beautiful, dark, and very funny writing.
    • 4/5
      Excellent stories--something sharp in every one.
    • 5/5
      Really nice collection of stories all hinging on a decision and its aftermath. I liked that the collection contained a range of voices and tones without feeling forced.
    • 4/5
      Debut collection. In most of the 11 stories characters make brief contact with another before receding back into their isolation. Bleaks worlds but with far more range than American Salvage. One a couple on a vacation away from the severely deformed child, another a Finnish mail bride and daughter, a lawyer, her son and insufferable grandfather, a couple that collects dogs to sell for medical use, in each case the person finds a moment where the veer closer to someone - even if it is only in their thoughts - only to realize or sense the futility. There is little redemption in Horrock's world but she gives us these characters whose bravery stems from recognition that there aren't any other good choices, anyway. Often we are in Michigan or thereabouts but we could be on a vacation in Greece or with a couple in Estonia or on a cruise so it would be unfair to set her down as a regional writer. Strong work.