Mending
New and Selected Stories
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Praise for Sallie Bingham:
"Sallie Bingham binds her collection together with sheer talent. The title novella is absolutely first-rate—a skillfully suggestive amalgam of Katherine Mansfield and Eudora Welty. This same unblinking gaze is hard at work on the essential weakness and dependence of men ('The Banks of the Ohio' and 'The Ice Party'), the illusion of freedom that comes with divorce ('Bare Bones'), and the desperate terror of adolescent love ('Winter Term')."—James R. Frakes, The New York Times Book Review
"Sallie Bingham's characters scrutinize their relationships with children, lovers, and their own treacherous souls. . . . Nearly every one of these flinty stories is a tiny masterpiece."—Entertainment Weekly
"Hardened but not compromised by adult life, these luminous stories . . . feature narrators who find mature, often solitary forms of reckoning, and even happiness. . . . There is not a false note in Bingham's striking collection."—Publishers Weekly, starred review
"These engaging tales span landscape, gender, and age, and readers will treasure Bingham's strikingly perceptive composition and refined, clever flashes of detail and clarity."—Booklist
Sallie Bingham published her first novel with Houghton Mifflin in 1961. Since then she has published four collections of short stories, four novels, and a memoir. She was book editor for The Courier-Journal in Louisville, Kentucky, and has been a director of the National Book Critics Circle. She is the founder of The Kentucky Foundation for Women.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Spanning 50 years, this omnibus of Bingham's tight, sparkling short fiction includes stories from her earliest collection, The Touching Hand (1967), to her latest, Red Car (2008). The title story that opens the collection demonstrates the attention to detail and skillfully rendered emotional tension that characterize Bingham's work. "My trade is doctors," the story's anxious young heroine declares as she visits one after the other. Believing herself deficient in feeling, she becomes smitten with her tired, green-eyed psychiatrist, "who seemed to have spent himself warming people up." Though he won't have her as a lover, she recognizes that his therapeutic acceptance of her scabby need is a kind of love. In "Found," set five years after the end of WWII, the privileged daughter of the U.S. ambassador to France comes to understand society's miseries while living in a Paris full of scarred, hostile survivors. In the disquieting "Anywhere You Send Me," the values of a wealthy, older woman clash with the unimaginable destitution of the motley band of Haitian refugees that she shelters on her Southern farm. Bingham's work, including favorites such as "The Wedding" and "Sweet Peas," remains sharp and deliciously unsettling, ripe for discovery by a new generation of readers.
