Winner of the 2010 G.S. Sharat Chandra Prize for Short Fiction. These 13 stories feature characters, especially young women, who redefine their sense
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Winner of the 2010 G.S. Sharat Chandra Prize for Short Fiction. These 13 stories feature characters, especially young women, who redefine their sense of belonging by reconciling with their pasts. Whether it is a plain-looking woman winning ungainly notoriety as a lingerie window model, a young figure skater being lured by a stalker, or a daughter examining her mother's accidental death at a horse farm, these stories' protagonists surprise themselves and the reader by finding their places in the world through unpredictable turns.
"The collection offers well-crafted, keen entertainment."
--Publishers Weekly
"The stories in Living Arrangements are rooted in the most important principles of literary art. They are not content simply to render the problems of characters; they transform those problems into the dynamic of desire, which drives all great narrative. And the desire in these stories is that of most great literature: the desire for self, the desire for a place in the world, in the universe."
–Robert Olen Butler
"Laura Walter writes with thoughtful compassion, and has a keen eye for finding the poetry in everyday life. Beneath the seemingly ordinary surfaces of her characters, she uncovers powerful emotional truth."
—Dan Chaon, author of Await Your Reply and Stay Awake
"Laura Maylene Walter's first book is a collection of fine and finely unsettling stories. In these wonderfully written little tempests, the characters possess a keen but rarely bitter clarity about the losses and accommodations that life demands. I continue to marvel at the way will and intent mesh in them, long after I put the book down."
–Kristin Ohlson, author of Stalking the Divine and co-author of Kabul Beauty School
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