She

Fiction

by Michelle Latiolais

This title was previously available on NetGalley and is now archived.

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Pub Date May 03 2016 | Archive Date Apr 30 2016

Description

A nameless fifteen-year-old runs away to Los Angeles, seeking life beyond the harsh constraints of her evangelical upbringing. She is the narrative of her passage, from her escape on a bus through her quiet, determined progress across the city’s unforgiving terrain. The journey takes her into and around the lives of Angelinos from all walks: a dancer whose hyperactive sense of smell makes her fiance’s presence insufferable; a penniless botanist who earns her keep creating sugar-icing flowers to decorate glamorous wedding cakes she can never afford; a dentist lamenting the abuses done to the teeth of a patient for whom he has cared dutifully. Her odd encounters, set against the backdrop of Los Angeles’s flagrant wealth, cast into relief its eccentricities and the everyday trials faced by its collection of lost souls. Together these stories reflect and refract one another, illuminating a poignant, unflinching portrait of loss and the search for identity in its wake.

A nameless fifteen-year-old runs away to Los Angeles, seeking life beyond the harsh constraints of her evangelical upbringing. She is the narrative of her passage, from her escape on a bus through...

A Note From the Publisher

LibraryReads nominations due 3/20.

Advance Praise

“A writer of delving insight and exhilarating exactitude in the mode of Lucia Berlin and Amy Hempel, Latiolais deftly contrasts moments of kindness and connection with shocking eruptions of lustful violence. Entrancing and rigorous, arch and jolting, Latiolais’ concentrated and astute dramas illuminate loneliness, womanhood, and the quest for meaning.” --Donna Seaman, Booklist

“She startled me. It’s been a long time since I’ve read a work that so captures the contradictions of Los Angeles, a seemingly beautiful and mild place that is so filled with ugliness and harshness, a city that people love to hate while they flock to it. The language, the structure, the conception of this book artfully paint the place and the people. I wish I could have written this, but I am neither as funny nor as smart at Michelle Latiolais.” - Percival Everett

“It is intense and beautiful, following Michelle Latiolais’s characters through her sun-drenched, ruthless Los Angeles, these women and girls always seemingly on the verge of disappearing, becoming nameless ghosts, yet tough, elemental, persevering, even though hope is as fragile as flowers made of sugar, and its sweetness always possibly the delusion of wishful thinking. These stories are as compassionate as they are unsentimental.” - Paul Harding, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Tinkers