“Bingham writes with an austere and unerring knowledge of what it is to be human” in these eleven stories of love, sex, and indiscretion (Paula Fox).
In her bracing new collection, Sallie Bingham examines modern-day transgressions in affairs of the heart, “focus[ing] mostly on the lives of women at different ages, stages, and conditions of life. The stories all concern the minutiae of relationships: what works and what doesn’t, what concessions are made for love, what lines are drawn for self-preservation, the hopeful and the hopeless” (Library Journal).
In “The Big Bed”, a sixty-four-year old woman offers up a ménage à trois hoping to reengage her straying lover; an aging teacher and her student can’t ignore the arousing and suggestive nature of an otherwise harmless project in “Apricots”; “Benjamin” is a seemingly secure ninety-year-old artist whose weaknesses are exposed by a young female fan; in “Stanley” a neurotically awkward man appears to have met his match on a discomforting first date; and in “Loving”, a husband confesses to wife the story of a long-lost never- forgotten love.
In this extraordinary collection, Sallie Bingham “explores the unexpected and sometimes disconcerting underside of experience” (Publishers Weekly). She has “the eye to see where a story lives, the heart to understand it, and the voice—and craft—to tell it” (Robin Morgan).
