From an ardently admired, award-winning writer — captivating new stories of love lost and regained. In her first book of short fiction since Various Antidotes, which was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, Joanna Scott offers a group of tales that compellingly demonstrate her special gift for capturing the breathtaking tension found even in life's quietest moments.

At the seaside wedding of two lovers kept apart by the caprices of fate, a doting uncle observes the happy couple while his errant brother — the father of the bride — struggles to free himself from a locked bathroom across town. A young woman arrives in Jazz Age New York with stars in her eyes and only a few coins in her pocket, but when she strikes up an unlikely relationship with her boss at Woolworth's, she is confronted with the unsettling reality of her situation.

A bright businessman is content with the spoils of a prosperous young career, until his car breaks down in a country town, upsetting his entire view. These are among the lives that Joanna Scott luminously and indelibly conjures in Everybody Loves Somebody.

"From the formidable imagination of Scott (Pulitzer Prize-finalist The Manikin, etc.) comes a collection of 10 stories that stalk across the 20th century to document love and its consequences. In 'Heaven and Hell,' a bride and groom seal their vows with a lengthy kiss after he returns home, blind, from WWI. 'The Lucite Cane' sees an elderly man navigating a slew of literal and metaphorical modern-day hazards in June 2000. A young Harlem mother abandons her daughter to join a cultlike church in 'The Queen of Sheba Is Afraid of Snow.' The teenage grifter at the center of 'Or Else' travels from New York to Europe and steals from her benefactor. In the title story, a New York advertising executive sent upstate to finalize a contract encounters trouble on his drive home to his wife and baby. Although the characters struggle differently, they are almost all observed by a Paul Bowles -style godless eye-in-the-sky that lays bare human frailty with almost unbearable acuity; the two first-person stories, 'Yip' and 'Across from the Shannonso,' don't convey the same gravitas. But Scott's craft can be breathtaking — and her perceptions uncanny." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"From the formidable imagination of Scott (Pulitzer Prize — finalist The Manikin, etc.) comes a collection of 10 stories that stalk across the 20th century to document love and its consequences. In 'Heaven and Hell,' a bride and groom seal their vows with a lengthy kiss after he returns home, blind, from WWI. 'The Lucite Cane' sees an elderly man navigating a slew of literal and metaphorical modern-day hazards in June 2000. A young Harlem mother abandons her daughter to join a cultlike church in 'The Queen of Sheba Is Afraid of Snow.' The teenage grifter at the center of 'Or Else' travels from New York to Europe and steals from her benefactor. In the title story, a New York advertising executive sent upstate to finalize a contract encounters trouble on his drive home to his wife and baby. Although the characters struggle differently, they are almost all observed by a Paul Bowles — style godless eye-in-the-sky that lays bare human frailty with almost unbearable acuity; the two first-person stories, 'Yip' and 'Across from the Shannonso,' don't convey the same gravitas. But Scott's craft can be breathtaking — and her perceptions uncanny." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"'Everybody Loves Somebody' will make the perfect gift for discerning young women of a literary bent. Its cover is aesthetically beautiful, and almost every sentence here is beautifully crafted, lapidary, exquisite to behold. Taken together these stories are overwhelmingly melancholy. But that's not necessarily a disadvantage — discerning young literary women are a fairly melancholy bunch.

..." Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) Joanna Scott's collection is mostly about men, women or children who have lost their way — hapless unfortunates as frail as minnows in the tumbling ocean. They possess neither control nor knowledge of their own lives. They are perishable. They — or their forlorn little hopes — often perish.

In 'Heaven and Hell' a pair of star-crossed lovers in the period just after World War I are finally able to marry. It is a moment of bittersweet happiness for the couple. (The groom has been blinded in combat.) But in the very same moment, the bride's father has managed to lock himself in the bathroom of a nearby seaside inn and will never make it to the ceremony: 'As a man, he drifted from job to job and woman to woman. And as a father, he had just drifted away.' The loss is all his, of course. The happy couple go on being happy, even as the bride's loser dad futilely bruises his shoulders against the bathroom door, and down on the beach where the couple embrace, a little boy almost drowns without being noticed. It's a bleak little story, detached, like W.H. Auden writing, without pity or emotion, about Icarus.

In 'Everybody Loves Somebody' we watch another father carelessly throw his life away, unknowingly, helplessly, a victim of fate and his own flawed character. Bob, who (rather vainly) drives a vintage MG, spends a good part of a day making a quarter-million-dollar sale. He's supposed to be on his way home to his wife and infant daughter, whose six-month birthday it is, but he's drunk way too many mimosas during his business transaction. Then he stops off for a beer in a bar, and a wheel falls off his car. There's a delay and another delay, and pretty soon it's too late to go home and face his wife. Poor Bob has taken a crucial wrong turn. He could have not done it, but he went ahead and did it, and there's no going back, no doing things over. I thought of Eudora Welty and her 'Death of a Traveling Salesman.'

And surely Dorothy Parker's 'The Big Blonde' informs 'Stumble,' a tale of a small-town girl named Ruth who absentmindedly loses her reputation and, with her family's approval, moves to Brooklyn to make her fortune. She lives in a rooming house, dines on canned soup and — heedlessly — gets work, first as a chorus girl, then a receptionist, then a waitress. She's supremely deluded, blind to the facts of her own life, until a man who she thinks is in love with her pays her for sex. Ruth finds herself out of a job, an orphan in the storm, shell-shocked, lost.

Scott's characters live in a soiled world. When Ruth serves her boyfriend a piece of pie, it's 'stale cherry pie stiff with tapioca, the crust streaked with hard-baked lard.' In 'Across From the Shannonso,' a wife lives an almost unendurable existence, sharing a crummy apartment with her unfaithful husband and her aging dad. When she sees a man taking a young boy up to her apartment house roof, she impulsively decides to rescue the child from an awful fate. Again, a string of events, combining external circumstances and her own dumb carelessness, make it so that her father is almost burned alive. She ends up living in an apartment more squalid than the first one.

And in 'The Queen of Sheba Is Afraid of Snow' — which rivals Hans Christian Andersen's 'The Little Match Girl' for sheer sadness — a mother, daughter and grandmother live in wretched poverty. The grandmother sells popcorn and roasted sweet potatoes to make a living; the mother drinks up the proceeds in gin.

Joanna Scott is merciless, rubbing our noses in suffering we can't do anything about. Maybe short stories like this do best in small doses, served up separately from each other. Many people like one or two anchovies in a Caesar salad, but would shrink from polishing off a pound of them at a time.

This wholly admirable author lost me in 'Or Else,' which takes an average woman and gives her four separate lives, according to whim, human weakness, external circumstance, fickle fate. It is a beloved truism of academic lit-crit these days that perhaps there is no real 'self,' that each of us is merely the sum of events that have happened to us. 'Or Else' aptly illustrates this, but my own — perhaps Philistine — response was a hearty 'Who cares!?' Sometimes, a little lapidary writing can go a long way. Having said that, I cringe. Maybe my own sensibilities are simply too unrefined for this collection." Reviewed by Carolyn See, who can be reached at www.carolynsee.com, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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"Each of these quietly well-crafted stories takes the reader to a place or an emotion that is palpable and enlightening. And each one will leave a lasting impression." Elizabeth Dickie, Booklist

"Scott serves up a haunting collection of characters all searching for human connections in their lives." Library Journal

"One of America's most underrated, important writers, Scott gets better with every book. A must-read." Kirkus Reviews

"In Scott's off-kilter tales, life is governed by chance, we are less logical than we think, and the world is full of mystery." (Grade: A-) Entertainment Weekly

Joanna Scott is the author of seven books of fiction, including the novels Tourmaline and Arrogance, and the PEN/Faulkner Award-winning story collection Various Antidotes. She is a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and a Lannan Award, and lives with her family in Rochester, New York.