Synopses & Reviews
"This book is as fresh and astringent as a raw secret whispered just before church."--Ron Carlson, author of
A Kind of FlyingTonsillectomies should not be attempted at home, cucumbers make lousy stand-ins, and golf clubs can be hazardous to a mother's health. Love and faith are treacherous negotiations. Mercy and malice go hand in hand. In Home Remedies Angela Pneuman renders these unsettling truths, small and large, with blazing insight and dark humor. A deeply affecting debut, the stories in this collection follow a compelling cast of characters, all of whom hail from Kentucky. A compassionate and clear-eyed look at religious faith and family ties,Home Remedies marks the beginning of a distinguished literary career.
"I love the way Angela Pneuman's characters soldier on in their curious, comic, questioning lives. I believe in them, which is to say that their troubles seem real, and, like long-time friends, their foibles amuse and alarm me." --Antonya Nelson, author of Living to Tell
"Smart, brave and unflinchingly honest, Angela Pneuman is a writer of such flinty brilliance and such dead-on, dead-pan humor it's often hard to believe you've arrived at the end of a story until stunned by the last gesture or word."--ZZ Packer, author of Drinking Coffee Elsewhere
"Without a doubt, Angela Pneuman is one of the most astonishingly talented young writers working today."--Julie Orringer, author of How to Breathe Underwater
ANGELA PNEUMAN is a recent Stegner Fellow in fiction at Stanford University. Stories from Home Remedies have appeared in The Best American Short Stories , Ploughshares , the Iowa Review , the Virginia Quarterly Review , Glimmer Train , and elsewhere. She lives in Albany, New York.
Review
ADVANCE PRAISE FOR
HOME REMEDIES"Smart, brave and unflinchingly honest, Angela Pneuman is a writer of such flinty brilliance and such dead-on, dead-pan humor its often hard to believe youve arrived at the end of a story until stunned by the last gesture or word." ZZ Packer
"Without a doubt, Angela Pneuman is one of the most astonishingly talented young writers working today. Her dark humor evokes Lorrie Moore, the richness and depth of her narratives call to mind Alice Munro, but these stories are all her own."Julie Orringer
Synopsis
Tonsillectomies should not be performed at home, cucumbers do not make good stand-ins, and golf clubs are not for hitting your mother.
Angela Pneuman renders these unsettling truths, small and large, with blazing insight in Home Remedies. It is a startling debut collection of stories peopled by Christian fundamentalists traversing various stages and crises of belief, grappling with intimacies that feel like an anxious mix of longing and repulsion, relating to one another in an uneasy balance of eagerness and wariness.
A compassionate and clear-eyed look at religious faith and family ties, Home Remedies marks the beginning of a distinguished literary career.
Synopsis
A volume of short works features Christian fundamentalist protagonists traversing various stages and crises of belief, grappling with mixed emotions, and relating to one another in an uneasy balance of eagerness and wariness. A first collection. Original.
About the Author
Angela Pneuman teaches fiction writing at Stanford University and works as a copywriter in the California wine industry. Her fiction takes a hard look at characters whose lives unfold and sometimes unravel in the towns and outlying rural areas of central Kentucky, where she was raised. Stories have appeared in Best American Short Stories (2004 & 2012), Ploughshares, Los Angeles Review, Iowa Review, Glimmer Train and many other literary magazines—and were collected in her first book, Home Remedies (Harcourt, 2007). Angela was a Stegner Fellow in fiction at Stanford, a Presidential Fellow in the PhD program at SUNY Albany, and the recipient of the first inaugural Alice Hoffman Prize for short fiction from Ploughshares.
Table of Contents
Contents
Home Remedies
All Saints Day
The Bell Ringer
Borderland
Invitation
The Beachcomber
Holy Land
The Long Game