Keynote
“Corinna Vallianatos can make an entire soul come shining out of the smallest phrase.”―Kevin Brockmeier
Book Title
Origin Stories
Subtitle
Stories
Cover Image
- “Contending with restless pasts and the shifting nature of marriage and motherhood, the narrators in this searching collection offer shrewd meditations on ambition, shame, artistic boundaries and more.”—?The New York Times Book Review
Body
The stories in Origin Stories take as their subject the sources of love, marriage, motherhood, friendship, artistic ambition, restiveness, and shame. Their narrators perceive more than is explicable, want more than they have, and contend with the bounty and frugality of their relationships. In “This Isn’t the Actual Sea,” a woman considers that her friend’s failure and sudden success have given her the material she needs to write something of her own, if she’s willing to risk the friendship to do so. “The Artist’s Wife” describes, in a painting stowed in a bowling alley broom closet, the chasm between seeing and being seen. “Dogwood” is a piece of lyric reportage on beauty, family, and survival whose sections range from the narrator’s childhood to her son’s new adulthood. And “Origin Story” acts as an accounting of the many different states where a woman and her husband have lived, and what it is they’ve been searching for.
In this keen, meditative collection set in Southern California and Virginia, Corinna Vallianatos dramatizes the bonds of mother and child, the self-destruction of young womanhood, the thrill and bewilderment of friendship, and the power of place.
Origin Stories is filled with humor, longing, beauty, and belief.
In this keen, meditative collection set in Southern California and Virginia, Corinna Vallianatos dramatizes the bonds of mother and child, the self-destruction of young womanhood, the thrill and bewilderment of friendship, and the power of place.
Origin Stories is filled with humor, longing, beauty, and belief.
List Price
$17.00
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About the Author
Credit: Photographer Credit / Ellen Reyes
Praise
- “Vallianatos is the master of cold laughter, of the marginally amused sideways glance that murders you a little bit. Her output is spare. Precise. Every single word she writes is true.”—Jessica Anthony, Electric Literature
- “Vallianatos’ second collection is shot through with startling revelations...Luminous stories that will reward patient readers.”—Kirkus Reviews
- “The stories in Vallianatos’s new collection center on the fraught details of relationships in many forms—between mother and child, spouses, and friends.”—Alta Online
- “Vallianatos shines in this wide-ranging collection.”—Publishers Weekly
