About this item
Joyce Carol Oates calls debut author Clare Beams "wickedly sharp-eyed, wholly unpredictable ... a female /feminist voice for the twenty-first century."The literary, historic, and fantastic collide in these wise and exquisitely unsettling stories. From bewildering assemblies in school auditoriums to the murky waters of a Depression-era health resort, Beams's landscapes are tinged with otherworldliness, and her characters' desires stretch the limits of reality. Ing nues at a boarding school bind themselves to their headmaster's vision of perfection ; a nineteenth-century landscape architect embarks on his first major project, but finds the terrain of class and power intractable ; a bride glimpses her husband's past when she wears his World War II parachute as a gown ; and a teacher comes undone in front of her astonished fifth graders.
About the Author
CLARE BEAMS is the author of the story collection We Show What We Have Learned, which won the Bard Fiction Prize and was a Kirkus Best Debut of 2016, as well as a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award, and the Shirley Jackson Award. Her novel The Illness Lesson will be published by Doubleday/Knopf in February 2020. Her fiction appears in One Story, Ecotone, The Common, the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature's Recommended Reading, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and has received special mention in The Best American Short Stories 2013 and The Pushcart Prize XXXV. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, and the Sustainable Arts Foundation. She lives in Pittsburgh with her husband and two daughters, and has taught creative writing at Carnegie Mellon University and St. Vincent College.
