Emergency: Stories - Hardcover

by Kathleen Alcott (Author)

A professor finds a photograph of her deceased mother in a compromising position on the wall of a museum. A twenty-something's lucrative remote work sparks paranoia and bigotry. A transplant to a new city must make a choice about who she trusts when her partner reveals a violent history. The summer after her divorce from an older man, an exiled painter's former friends grapple with rumors that she attempted to pass as a teenager.

In this long-awaited debut collection, Kathleen Alcott turns her skills as a stylist on the unfreedoms of American life--as well as the guilt that stalks those who survive them. Emergency roams from European cities to scorched California towns, drug-smeared motel rooms to polished dinner parties, taking taut, surprising portraits of addiction, love, misogyny, and sexual power. Confronting the hidden perils of class ascension, the women in these stories try to pay down the psychic debts of their old lives as they search for a new happiness they can afford.

Back Jacket

Praise for Kathleen Alcott

"Amidst the noise of the world we live in, Alcott's voice is the one I want to always hear."
-- Valeria Luiselli, author of Lost Children Archive

"Alcott is an impressionistic stylist capable of lovely, luminous effects on the brushstroke level of the sentence."
-- Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

"[Alcott writes] shimmering, knife-sharp descriptions of small and often devastating moments of individual experience."
-- Karen Thompson Walker, New York Times Book Review