Desire and privilege are at the center of #KathleenAlcott 's new collection of short stories, #Emergency (#Norton). The women characters in her collection of stories are all facing a point of no return.
A professor finds a photograph of her deceased mother in a compromising position on the wall of a museum. A twenty-something’s lucrative remote work sparks paranoia and bigotry. A transplant to a new city must make a choice about who she trusts when her partner reveals a violent history. The summer after her divorce from an older man, an exiled painter’s former friends grapple with rumors that she attempted to pass as a teenager.
In this long-awaited debut collection, Kathleen Alcott turns her skills as a stylist on the unfreedoms of American life—as well as the guilt that stalks those who survive them. Emergency roams from European cities to scorched California towns, drug-smeared motel rooms to polished dinner parties, taking taut, surprising portraits of addiction, love, misogyny, and sexual power. Confronting the hidden perils of class ascension, the women in these stories try to pay down the psychic debts of their old lives as they search for a new happiness they can afford.
Born and raised in Northern California, Kathleen Alcott presently resides in Brooklyn. Her short fiction, criticism, and essay have appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The New Yorker online, ZYZZYVA, The Coffin Factory, and elsewhere.
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