From Kate Walbert, the highly acclaimed, National Book Award nominee, comes "SHE WAS LIKE THAT", a dazzling, career-spanning collection of new and selected stories about the trials of womanhood and the vulnerabilities of motherhood.

She Was Like That: New and Selected Stories

In these deft, acutely funny, heartbreaking stories, Kate Walbert delves into the hearts and minds of women in the age of anxiety. Her characters are uneasy in one way or another; they all yearn for connection; they all struggle to find meaning in their lives as mothers, wives, and daughters; they all try to find their own voices often within isolated, and isolating, circumstances.

In the dazzling opening story “M&M World,” a mother is plunged into panic when she briefly loses one of her daughters at the Times Square store. In “Slow the Heart,” a mother tries to ease tension at the dinner table with Roses and Thorns, the game she knows the Obamas played in the White House. In “Radical Feminists,” a woman skating with her two children encounters the man who derailed her career a decade earlier. And in the story, “A Mother Is Someone Who Tells Jokes,” a grieving mother reflects on the kindergarten project that preceded her son’s autism diagnosis.


Advance Praise for She Was Like That:


“I loved these stories, wide-open, varied, generous, warm, funny.”—Tessa Hadley, author of Late in the Day

“Kate Walbert is inarguably one of our foremost chroniclers of the existential dilemma of being not just a woman, but a human. With astonishing precision, alive and alert to the complications embedded in even the simplest exchange, Walbert slips into the fissures and fault lines of her utterly compelling characters doing the best of what a writer can do: she makes the familiar strange, and in doing so, reveals the glorious complexity of a world we only think we know.”—Marisa Silver, author of Mary Coin


Kate Walbert

 

Kate Walbert was born in New York City and raised in Georgia, Texas, Japan and Pennsylvania, among other places.

She is the author of A Short History of Women, chosen by The New York Times Book Review as one of the ten best books of 2009 and a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize; Our Kind, a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction in 2004; The Gardens of Kyoto, winner of the 2002 Connecticut Book Award in Fiction in 2002; and Where She Went, a collection of linked stories and New York Times notable book.

She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fiction fellowship, a Connecticut Commission on the Arts fiction fellowship, and a Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library.

Her short fiction has been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Best American Short Stories and The O. Henry Prize stories.

From 1990 to 2005, she lectured in fiction writing at Yale University. She currently lives in New York City with her family.

http://www.katewalbert.com/