In These Times the Home Is a Tired Place

When an unwed pregnant woman is pressured to get married by her boyfriend parents and the entire culture around her she sees a feverish intensity emanating from the path to domesticity a paved path shaded by thick-trunked trees lined with trim grass and manicured mansions where miniature houses play mailboxes and animals play lawn ornaments and people play happiness. Jessica Hollander's debut collection exposes a culture that glorifies and disparages traditional domesticity where people's confusion apathy and anxiety about the institutions of marriage and family often drive them to self-destruction. The world in Hollander's nineteen stories appears at once familiar and vividly unsettling with undercurrents of anger and violence attached to everyday objects and spaces: a pink room is a woman exploded home smells of laundered clothes and gas from the grill and the sun is so bright the sky fills with over-exposure wilting the corners to orange to red to black. Here people adopt extreme and erratic behavior: hack at furniture have affairs with high school students fantasize about sex with monsters laden flower bouquets with messages of hate; but these self-destructive acts and fantasies feel strangely like a form of growth or enlightenment or at least the only form that's available to them. As characters become girlfriends wives husbands and mothers they struggle within their roles either fighting to escape them or struggling to play them correctly but always concerned with the loss of individuality of being swallowed up by society's expectations and becoming a mother or a wife instead of remaining themselves.Hollander's debut collection effectively fuses the common (childhood adventures unhappy adults) with the bizarre (a grandmother obsessed with buttons a gym full of people refusing to wear clothes) to create an intriguing volume. . . . The details in these stories ring true and are recognizable amid the insanity. A potent work from a strong new literary voice.-Publishers Weekly starred review These are human tales of vigorously individual characters living with intensity. The author's ear for revealing dialogue and double-edged humor ground these stories in a reality worth enduring. The characters connect despite suspicion and betrayal beyond blood circumstance or embarrassment at their own ridiculous humanity. Each piece is powered by a deep slow boiling jubilation in the moment-to-moment line-by-line fact of taking breath.-Katherine Dunn author of Geek Love and judgeJESSICA HOLLANDER grew up in Ann Arbor Michigan and received her BA from the University of Michigan. She holds an MFA from the University of Alabama. Her stories have appeared in over fifty journals including The Cincinnati Review The Journal Quarterly West and Web Conjunctions and she will be anthologized in The Lineup: 25 Provocative Women Writers. She teaches at the University of Alabama.