Stone Baby

Stories

by Michelle Sacks

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Pub Date Dec 15 2017 | Archive Date Jan 23 2018

Northwestern University Press | Triquarterly

General Fiction (Adult)

Description

This debut collection of stories by Michelle Sacks features characters from many walks of life, scattered around the globe—a young Irish woman backpacking in India, an ambitious black South African businessman, a roving killer for hire, a former SS officer. Their stories usually lead them—and us—to pivotal events that reveal unexpected, hidden truths.

Working on a large canvas that encompasses the extremes of rural Africa and urban London, material poverty and the surfeit of privilege, Sacks writes stories peopled by characters whose lives occasionally crisscross, with a protagonist in one story playing a deceptively small role in another. The stories artfully illuminate the rich interconnections and clashes that occur as her characters strike out boldly, yet find themselves at the mercy of capricious waves of circumstance.

Stone Baby explores movement, loss, and reinvention in the lives of people who are in the wrong place, in the wrong body, perhaps in the wrong life—it encapsulates an engrossing and urgent message in our age of migration and dislocation.

Advance Praise

“Michelle Sacks’s stories invoke a gritty, conversational lyricism that is quite beautiful and engaging. There is a thematic continuity running throughout—a worldliness and an intimacy, a deep interest in wayward psychology, and a sort of relentless search for relationship and family, both invented and real. The stories do not shy away from difficulty, and this makes them honest, genuine, and interesting. This is a beautifully written and meticulously crafted collection.” —Rebecca Lee, author of Bobcat and Other Stories and The City Is a Rising Tide
"What tough-minded, original stories these are—knowing, disturbing, and full of dazzling talent. As the settings move from Cape Town to Berlin to Bali to Dublin, we follow a superb array of characters (splendid, evil, and everything in between) in a cycle of harming and helping. Stone Baby is a chronicle of high-risk adventures and emergency escapes–-wonderfully told and quite unforgettable." —Joan Silber, author of Fools and Ideas of Heaven: A Ring of Stories
"...the collection as a whole grants far-reaching insight into issues of our world. A geopolitical collection of people with pasts." —Kirkus Reviews

Available Editions

EDITION	Other Format
ISBN	9780810136151
PRICE	$17.95 (USD)
PAGES	216

Additional Information

Average rating from 11 members

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Featured Reviews

Mike D, Reviewer

This was a completely random selection, something attracted me to this collection, I didn't fight the attraction and what a pleasant surprise this turned out to be. Actually pleasant surprise doesn't quite cover it, this stories are terrific and each has one is an emotional powerhouse. Tangentially connected with recurring characters, scenery and themes these tales of love, grief and survival are guaranteed to affect even the most stoic of readers. I enjoy plot driven fiction, so for me the best short stories are essentially novels with less words, traditional narrative form of three (or however many it takes) acts with arcs and resolutions as oppose to something that reads more like a character sketch of a brief glimpse into a fictional life. And so for me this collection was perfect, each one a complete story, original and memorable. Each one exceptionally well written in that the author creates an utterly believable utterly credible authenticity in her characters and situations that are very easy to engage with even for a less emotionally available audience. Stone Baby is the name of one of the stories and a soul of two, representing the strangeness, mystery and beauty of the world around us. In fact, a perfectly apt title for a collection of stories that are sure to leave the readers meditating on those very ideas. Immensely enjoyable book. Enthusiastically recommended. Thanks to Netgalley.

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Lee P, Media/Journalist

Challenging, often invigorating short stories from a writer I’m previously unaware of. Enjoyed the deftness of her sentence structures, the wild energy barely suppressed in her prose. Some pieces felt more accessible than others, but overall, a promising new talent.