Bostons Pa

Carolyn Cooke's stories have been featured in several volumes of PRIZE STORIES: THE O. HENRY AWARDS and THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES. Her highly anticipated debut collection tells hilarious and often savage truths about people struggling within the confines of history, society, and class.
Mr. Sargent, the aging Brahmin aesthete of the title story, scribbles his epiphanies on cocktail napkins and covers them up with his drinks. A Maine innkeeper shoots his wife, who remains bitterly loyal to him until the death of their son. A whole family conspires to keep the birth of yet another dirt-poor relation a secret from his grandmother. On the icy cobblestone streets of Boston and the rockbound coast of Maine, these vividly realized characters try to reconcile habits of obedience and self-reliance with the urgent desire to capture the wild core of life. The result is an explosion of exquisitely tuned voices, as authentic as they are unforgettable.

Carolyn Cooke's stories have been featured in several volumes of PRIZE STORIES: THE O. HENRY AWARDS and THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES. Her highly anticipated debut collection tells hilarious and often savage truths about people struggling within the confines of history, society, and class.
Mr. Sargent, the aging Brahmin aesthete of the title story, scribbles his epiphanies on cocktail napkins and covers them up with his drinks. A Maine innkeeper shoots his wife, who remains bitterly loyal to him until the death of their son. A whole family conspires to keep the birth of yet another dirt-poor relation a secret from his grandmother. On the icy cobblestone streets of Boston and the rockbound coast of Maine, these vividly realized characters try to reconcile habits of obedience and self-reliance with the urgent desire to capture the wild core of life. The result is an explosion of exquisitely tuned voices, as authentic as they are unforgettable.

Kirkus Reviews

A seductively written, engaging first collection organized around a family of "Bostons," the name native Maine residents assign vacationers from the south. Cooke brings the fully rounded pleasures and character depth of a novel to her interlinked tales. No one person dominates, though most belong to a single extended family and recur from story to story; the main thematic materials are articulated obliquely, revealed as often by the gaps between pieces as by the descriptions in the stories. In "Bob Darling," an aging man in flagging health takes a last European sojourn with a woman he met abroad. The wonderful paired "The Black Book" and "The Trouble With Money" show two women-unconventional, revolutionaries in the modern, modest, liberal sense-feeling their way through the nature of their attraction to each other while one travels to her son's wedding as a gift to her ailing daughter. The touching title story tells of Mrs. Sargent's relentless desire to clear her husband's amateur paintings out of the house. The quietly heartbreaking "The Sugar Tit" shadows a woman who throughout her life has been forced to participate in and witness an array of indignities. And the richly told finale comprises another linked pair: "Girl of Their Dreams" tells of Buck Burns's early marriage, beautifully evoking the thrill and blind passions of youthful love; "The Mourning Party," set much later, recounts the blind, passionate, occasionally brutal grieving at Buck's funeral. Cooke's attractive voice alternately thrusts bluntly and lilts poetically, keeping the reader alive to the shifts of emotional texture and mood that enrich this promising debut.

CAROLYN COOKE's stories have been featured in The Best American Short Stories and twice in Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. A graduate of Columbia University's MFA program, Cooke has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Yaddo. Born in Maine and raised in Boston, she has been a staff writer for Penthouse and reviewed fiction for The Nation. She lives in northern California with her husband and two children.