A New Day

Stories

by Sue Mell

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Pub Date Sep 03 2024 | Archive Date Aug 04 2024

Caitlin Hamilton Marketing & Publicity | She Writes Press

General Fiction (Adult) | Literary Fiction

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Description

For fans of Lily King’s Five Tuesdays in Winter, a contemporary short story collection that explores the depths of everyday humanity and the universal yearning for new beginnings.

Linked by their personal and professional relationships, the characters in these thirteen stories—all set between 1982 and 2012—struggle to achieve happiness and success. A coke-fueled night with a photographer costs a young woman her job in the display department of Bloomingdale’s, but holds a hidden promise. A sculptor tries to resurrect his relationship with an old flame on the same day her best friend is undergoing a bone marrow transplant. An aspiring actress drifts from house-sit to house-sit until an armed robbery at the restaurant where she works makes her question a lifelong pattern of impermanence.

Moody, elegiac, and full of longing, with ricocheting themes of desire and loss, A New Day’s stories are steeped in the highs and lows inherent in the pursuit of love and creative expression.

A Note From the Publisher

SUE MELL’s story collection, A New Day, was a finalist for the 2021 St. Lawrence Book Award, and is forthcoming from She Writes Press September 3rd, 2024. Her debut novel, Provenance, won the Madville Publishing Blue Moon Novel Award, and was selected as a Great Group Read by the Women's National Book Association, and as an Indie Fiction Pick by the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses. Her collection of micro essays, Giving Care, won the Chestnut Review Prose Chapbook Prize. Other work has appeared in Narrative Magazine, Hippocampus Magazine, Jellyfish Review, Cleaver Magazine, and elsewhere. She earned her MFA from Warren Wilson, was a BookEnds fellow at SUNY Stony Brook, and lives in Queens, New York, where she cares for her aging mom and a gray tuxedo cat named Poppy.

SUE MELL’s story collection, A New Day, was a finalist for the 2021 St. Lawrence Book Award, and is forthcoming from She Writes Press September 3rd, 2024. Her debut novel, Provenance, won the...

Advance Praise

"Endlessly fascinating characters propel these wonderfully ardent stories."—KIRKUS REVIEWS

“I loved the loops and tangles in this gorgeous net of stories. It’s such a beautifully mapped world, where every friendship has its betrayals and rescues and every city is one in which ‘you were bound, eventually, to bump into everyone you’d ever slept with.’ A wonderful and clear-sighted book.”—JOAN SILBER, author of Secrets of Happiness and Improvement

“Sue Mell brilliantly crosses three decades of heartbreak, desire, and discovery in these sharp and nimble stories. The trio of women at the heart of A New Day are whip-smart, creative, vulnerable, determined. I would follow them anywhere.”—LAURA VAN DEN BERG, author of State of Paradise

“A wise and tender portrait of chance encounters and missed connections, Sue Mell’s A New Day is a love letter to the people we meet along the way and those we leave behind. I loved it.”—DAISY ALPERT FLORIN, author of My Last Innocent Year

“Sex, money, ambition, friendship; the myriad challenges of ordinary survival in A New Day are handled with wry and artful insight. Beautifully complex characters are pieces of a puzzle in this fine collection, while each story is both distinct and part of the whole.”—LOUISE MARBURG, author of You Have Reached Your Destination

“An enthralling and visceral collection about both our inescapable interconnectedness and loneliness, the role chance plays in the decisions we make, and how even the most seemingly small moments irrevocably impact our lives.”—RONIT PLANK, author of Home Is a Made-Up Place

“Clear prose, vivid scenes, and snappy dialogue bring Mell’s well-developed characters to life. These linked stories explore relationships—evocative snapshots revealing desire, love, loss, and everything in between.”—CORIE ADJMI, author of Life and Other Shortcomings

“This collection beautifully captures the delicious chaos of real life, lived over decades of mingled success and disappointment, of missed connections and second chances.”—CAITLIN HORROCKS, author of Life Among the Terranauts

"Endlessly fascinating characters propel these wonderfully ardent stories."—KIRKUS REVIEWS

“I loved the loops and tangles in this gorgeous net of stories. It’s such a beautifully mapped world, where...