A collection of stories set in a not-so bucolic Vermont, a land of antique stores, small towns, fading farms, and young women trying to figure out marriage, motherhood, sex and their own power.
PREPARE HER
by Genevieve Plunkett
Catapult, July 2021
PREPARE HER tells the stories of young women at the brink of discovering their own power. The crossroads in their lives are not always the obvious kind—divorce, motherhood, coming of age—but sometimes much more private and dramatic. Kitty discovers that her ex-boyfriend has committed a murder; Renee navigates a friendship with Arla, a Jehovah’s Witness; Emi realizes that her boyfriend is fetishizing her mental illness; Petra acts recklessly when faced with a client with a gun; and Rachel must grapple with the reality of raising a daughter in a world that she, herself, is still terrified of.
Tempered by its rural and often haunting Vermont setting, this book explores the complexities of gender and power imbalances in a way that transforms normal life into something mysterious, uncharted, and sometimes bewildering. Through this lens, we can see the many subtle, yet staggering injustices endured by the women at the center of these stories, as well as identify what, or who might be responsible.
Genevieve Plunkett is the recipient of an O. Henry Award. Her work has also appeared in The Best Small Fictions, and journals such as New England Review, The Southern Review, Crazyhorse, The Colorado Review, and Willow Springs. She lives in Vermont with her two children. She is at work on her debut novel, which is also forthcoming from Catapult.
The haunting stories in HAO follow Chinese women in both China and America attempting to find language to navigate not only the immigrant experience but the strange continent of motherhood. Confronted with vast silences of gender and identity and trauma, these characters search for words to form fragile intimacies across alien or inhospitable landscapes. In the title story, “Hao,” a persecuted teacher attempts to survive the Cultural Revolution through a word game she plays with her daughter. In “Crazy English,” a woman who comes to America on a fiancée visa struggles with her anxiety around the English language and the looming menace of a stalker. In “A Drawer,” an illiterate teen mother in mid-20th Century wartime China tries to invent a language for herself through drawing.
Children are odd. And so are grandparents. Children grow up, get a mortgage, and refuse to touch the cheap booze they used to binge-drink at parties – while their grandparents rediscover a childlike pleasure in conquering the world and pushing the boundaries. Meanwhile, the younger generation prefers to stay at home, and to ‘find’ itself by living between the fridge and the computer. In this new collection of stories, told with much love and humour, family man Wladimir Kaminer reveals the complicated relationship between the generations.
Bryan Washington s’est vu décerner le prix Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literacy Excellence pour son recueil de nouvelles LOT.