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Falling Women and Other Stories
Short stories in this collection have PEN Fiction Prize, a Virginia Fiction Fellowship, the Lip Service Prose Prize, a Pushcart Prize nomination, Negative Capability Award, William Faulkner Short Story Finalist and other awards.
These short stories about families in turmoil and children in peril, from a homeless mother forced to put her son in foster care to a suburban mother afraid of passing her water phobia to her son. Braxton, North Carolina is the where in these stories, an imaginary coastal town adjacent to Camp Corregidor, a stopover for recruits on their way to Vietnam and later to Iraq. Braxton is the home front, where citizens battle alcoholism, marital breakups, and scandal. In Braxton, when a sister or father does wrong, the whole family shares the blame. Even Braxton's babysitters are dangerous, snooping, stealing secrets - and husbands. But love abounds. Sisters driven apart by scandal reunite when their father remarries. The babysitter who ran off with the mayor is welcomed back into her family when she returns to Braxton pregnant. A woman on the verge of being committed to an asylum for alcoholism is pulled back from the brink by a devoted friend.
"The World As I Know It" won a PEN Syndicate Fiction Prize; "The Yellow Sneakers" won a Dexter Review Short Story Prize; "Jazzland" won the Lip Service Prose Prize; and an earlier version of "Falling Women" won a Virginia Fiction Fellowship for Ms. Herbert.
These short stories about families in turmoil and children in peril, from a homeless mother forced to put her son in foster care to a suburban mother afraid of passing her water phobia to her son. Braxton, North Carolina is the where in these stories, an imaginary coastal town adjacent to Camp Corregidor, a stopover for recruits on their way to Vietnam and later to Iraq. Braxton is the home front, where citizens battle alcoholism, marital breakups, and scandal. In Braxton, when a sister or father does wrong, the whole family shares the blame. Even Braxton's babysitters are dangerous, snooping, stealing secrets - and husbands. But love abounds. Sisters driven apart by scandal reunite when their father remarries. The babysitter who ran off with the mayor is welcomed back into her family when she returns to Braxton pregnant. A woman on the verge of being committed to an asylum for alcoholism is pulled back from the brink by a devoted friend.
"The World As I Know It" won a PEN Syndicate Fiction Prize; "The Yellow Sneakers" won a Dexter Review Short Story Prize; "Jazzland" won the Lip Service Prose Prize; and an earlier version of "Falling Women" won a Virginia Fiction Fellowship for Ms. Herbert.
152 pages, Paperback
First published February 3, 2012
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
June 18, 2012
Short Stories that burn like incense
Ellen Herbert has that ability to transform even the most mundane characters and ideas and incidents into incendiary rockets that take a while to ascend into the night air but then burst into brilliant flares before then slowly, insidiously make their way back into gravity's pull. It takes a keenly trained writer to do this (Herbert even teaches the craft): it takes a magnetized brain to absorb all the humanistic data that flows through her pen. The combination is, well, extraordinary.
And if all that sounds as though Ellen Herbert is writing about major philosophical universal issues then just dip into this treasure trove and what you will find are stories about the frailty of people, especially women who all happen to be concentrated in the town created called Braxton, North Carolina which juts happens to be adjacent to a military establishment where GIs are deployed to wars in strange places while the women left behind cope with alcoholism, phases of mental instability, passion intact and aborted, compromised marriages, competitive sports, illusions about love, questions about standards, pregnancies - all of the trials and battles that are faced by merely being alive and how various women cope, submit, conquer. These may be fictional tales but they ring as true as thumbing through a high school yearbook when you're well past 30 or 40.
The magic comes in the manner in which Herbert relates these bits of secrets and gossip and confessions and unbearably ordinary lives. She has given us a panoply of life in this series of stories - and there probably is not a person here you could say you haven't known. You can still smell the accompanying incense long into the night. That is a feat - and she has accomplished it!
Grady Harp
Ellen Herbert has that ability to transform even the most mundane characters and ideas and incidents into incendiary rockets that take a while to ascend into the night air but then burst into brilliant flares before then slowly, insidiously make their way back into gravity's pull. It takes a keenly trained writer to do this (Herbert even teaches the craft): it takes a magnetized brain to absorb all the humanistic data that flows through her pen. The combination is, well, extraordinary.
And if all that sounds as though Ellen Herbert is writing about major philosophical universal issues then just dip into this treasure trove and what you will find are stories about the frailty of people, especially women who all happen to be concentrated in the town created called Braxton, North Carolina which juts happens to be adjacent to a military establishment where GIs are deployed to wars in strange places while the women left behind cope with alcoholism, phases of mental instability, passion intact and aborted, compromised marriages, competitive sports, illusions about love, questions about standards, pregnancies - all of the trials and battles that are faced by merely being alive and how various women cope, submit, conquer. These may be fictional tales but they ring as true as thumbing through a high school yearbook when you're well past 30 or 40.
The magic comes in the manner in which Herbert relates these bits of secrets and gossip and confessions and unbearably ordinary lives. She has given us a panoply of life in this series of stories - and there probably is not a person here you could say you haven't known. You can still smell the accompanying incense long into the night. That is a feat - and she has accomplished it!
Grady Harp
April 19, 2013
Falling Women, and Other Stories, is a hauntingly beautiful collection of stories from the author Ellen Herbert. You can follow links to buy it on Kindle here. In one story, a woman talks to her bottle of bourbon “Jim Beam” as if it is her best friend. She struggles with whether to go on the wagon and have a relationship with her cold husband, or go back to Jim. Nothing she does makes any difference anyway, and in the end her husband suddenly dies. Released, she reclaims her life as a sexual woman and strikes up an affair with the funeral home director. Eventually, she realizes that this too will lead to a form of imprisonment.
Falling Women is a richly and beautifully told series of stories that will be unlike anything you have read before.
Falling Women is a richly and beautifully told series of stories that will be unlike anything you have read before.
May 3, 2012
A great collection of short stories, all revolving, more or less, around life in the town of Braxton. I like collections like this, where characters keep showing up, interacting, changing, etc. This is kind of like The Great House, without the lame storyline. Actually reminded me of a prose based Essex County, which is one of my favorite graphic novels ever. The writing is good, the stories move along at a smooth pace, and most of the characters are compelling. I really enjoyed how she weaved all the characters together, so in a way the last story felt like the end of a novel. Makes me jealous of my own short stories, which aren't nearly as interconnected. Well done.
April 28, 2012
As a general rule, I'm not a fan of short stories. I never feel that I'm with the characters long enough to connect with them. Ellen Herbert has either broken the mold or proven me completely wrong. Using each and every carefully chosen word, she has not only painted a vivid world, but made me feel as though I've known her characters forever. Her imagery is poetic and carries the perfect amount of tension to keep me holding my breath and turning the pages. Like a good TV series, you reach the end of one episode and can't wait for the next. I may become a fan of short stories after all.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews