Synopses & Reviews
The author of Monkeys and Evening focuses her observant eye and lyrical voice on the delicate emotional negotiations of young New Yorkers. As in a series of deceptively simple watercolors, these stories uncover small moments that yield larger truths about the ways in which women and men come together and come apart again, about the disappointments and hopes of lovers who know what they want but don't always know how to keep. A deeply poignant meditation on the nature of desire and loss.
Review
"Susan Minot has a laser instinct for the clinching detail and the giveaway phrase....A writer to watch." Time
Review
"[These stories] address the condition of love in 12 of its aspects, and they do so with disarming clarity and lyrical directness....Ms. Minot's book is as timeless as its subject, as timeless as midnight swims, dinner-party gossip, a night kiss on a city street....This is a superbly organized, poignant, and profound collection." James Robison, The New York Times Book Review
Review
"Minot is a master at putting into frame and focus the tiny, daily scenes that reverberate with large implication." Mademoiselle
Review
"Minot follows up her heralded first novel, Monkeys, with a searing exploration of male-female relationships....Minot's writing is sparse and poetic, painfully close to the surface. Her stories are insightful and worldly wise, cynical about love but unable to escape its lure." Library Journal
Review
"After Minot's promising debut with Monkeys, the short stories in this slender collection are disappointingly one-dimensional....Although cleanly crafted, immediate and endowed with lifelike dialogue, these stories are opaque shards of experience, unyielding, depressive, and even trite." Publishers Weekly
Review
"These brief, beautifully written stories employ economical prose and an elegiac mood to portray young women yearning for something more than short-term sex. Their lovers, though, want to keep things cool....Minot's situations are not unusual, but her prose is....By writing little, she says a lot." Elizabeth Stevens, Women's Review of Books
Synopsis
Men and women from their teenage years to their early thirties are vividly portrayed in this collection of stories as they fall in love, live together, fight, and break up. They inhabit a world where traditional values of marriage and family no longer exist. This group of young artists, journalists, lawyers, and actors living in New York City find it easier to decode the intricacies of the fast track than the more basic ones of the human heart.
About the Author
Susan Minot was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and grew up in Manchester-by-the-Sea. She studied writing and painting at Brown University and received an MFA in writing from Columbia University. After publishing short stories in
Grand Street and
The New Yorker she was offered a contract for a novel by the legendary publisher Seymour Lawrence. His initial support for "a work of fiction" became
Monkeys, nine stories which together make up a novel about the Vincent family. It was published in a dozen countries and won the Prix Femina Etranger in France in l987.
The novel was followed by Lust & Other Stories, a collection about wayward artists and journalists living in New York City, particularly about the relations between men and women in their twenties and thirties having difficulty coming together and difficulty breaking apart. In l994 she was contacted by the director Bernardo Bertolucci to write the screenplay for his film Stealing Beauty. Her other books are Folly and Evening. Minot lives in New York City.