Where The Road Bottoms Out: Stories

by Victoria Redel

Where the Road Bottoms Out delivers us to the scenes of a young woman's battles against the various forces that would rob her of her freedom -- the relations that define her apart from how she would define herself.

These are stories of what it means to be embedded in the multiform drama of parent and here a mother buries her children; there daughters watch grieving fathers and fathers scamming. Punctuated by dislocation and loss, this drama often turns on the inevitable moment that intimacy and love overlap with something that feels like violence, or at the point when a new kind of awareness is achieved as the solitary voice of one daughter dissolves into a "we" of sisters.

Redel's charged and lyrical fictions enact a movement both away from a life and toward taking possession of a life. Over mountains, from hotel to hotel, in cars, on foot, we follow her determined journey to record her adventures as a first-generation American and as a writer of English prose.

Here is a striking debut. Sixteen stories that combine an uncompromising and definitive "No!" with an astonishing tenderness.

Genres: Short Stories

171 pages, Hardcover

First published May 2, 1995

About the author

Victoria Redel's newest novel is I Am You (September 30, 2025, SJP Lit/Zando), which Melissa Febos calls "A lush, sexy, absorbing novel that brings to life two artists who are inextricably linked in passion and competition."

Redel's work includes four books of poetry, most recently Paradise, and the novel Before Everything. Her short stories, poetry and essays have appeared in Granta, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Bomb, One Story, Salmagundi, O, and NOON, among many others. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts and the Fine Arts Work Center. She is a professor in the graduate and undergraduate creative writing programs at Sarah Lawrence College and splits her time between Utah and New York City.
Redel is on the graduate and undergraduate faculty of Sarah Lawrence College. She has taught in the Graduate Writing Programs of Columbia University and Vermont College. Redel was the McGee Professor at Davidson College. She has received fellowships from The Guggenheim Foundation, The National Endowment For The Arts and the Fine Arts Work Center.

Victoria Redel was born in New York. She is a first generation American of Belgian, Rumanian, Egyptian and Russian and Polish descent. She attended Dartmouth College (BA) and Columbia University (MFA).

Reviews

[Sandra Novack · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great collection by a poet who transitioned to short story writing and then novel writing. A great writer for anyone doing the same.

The language in this collection is lovely, spare and rhythmic, just like poetry and is as concerned with absence and negation as a John Donne poem. A great pleasure to read, and I rec. for anyone who writes too much or says too much--Victoria's book will give you a great eye-opener on the other side of saying little and having what is said MEAN much.