BY THE AUTHOR OF THE BOOKER SHORTLISTED AND NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING GREAT CIRCLE 'Maggie Shipstead combines cinematic scope with a poet's attention to detail' THE TIMES A collection of sparkling award-winning stories from Maggie Shipstead, epic storyteller and astonishing chronicler of the daring and the damaged. Diving into eclectic and vivid settings, from an Olympic village to a deathbed in Paris to a Pacific atoll, and illuminating a cast of unforgettable characters, Shipstead traverses the ordinary and extraordinary with cunning, compassion, and wit. Meet the silent cowgirl looking for a quiet life on a remote ranch in Montana, only to fall into a triangle of unrequited love; a self-aggrandizing male novelist who comes to terms with the girlfriend he never had just as his literary debut goes to print; a honeymoon couple's time in the hills of Romania builds into a moment of shattering tragedy. In the title story, a famous child actress breaks away from a religious cult, as she tells - with brittle candour - her tale of childhood damage and the dark side of fame. Exuding both tenderness and bite, Shipstead exposes complicated truths in this dazzling collection sealing her reputation as an astonishingly versatile master of fiction. ——————————- 'Shipstead is a writer who can vividly summon whatever she chooses, taking the reader deep inside the world she creates' FINANCIAL TIMES
Author
Maggie Shipstead is the New York Times-bestselling author of the novels Astonish Me and Seating Arrangements, winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize and the L.A. Times Book Prize for First Fiction. A third novel, Great Circle, will be published in May 2021. She is a graduate of Harvard and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford, and the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her writing has appeared in many places, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, the Wall Street Journal, Travel + Leisure, Departures, Condé Nast Traveler, Outside, The Best American Short Stories, and The Best American Sports Writing. In 2012 and 2018, she was a National Magazine Award finalist for fiction. She lives in Los Angeles.
