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
- “These dark, devastating stories are love meditations, each offering a secret lesson on how to navigate our new world as woman, daughter, mother, artist. Page-turners each one, full of power, brilliance, and racing energy.”—Deb Olin Unferth
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
Upcoming Events
Corinna Vallianatos reading and in conversation with Colin Winnette for ORIGIN STORIES
Date:
Location:
Green Apple Books on the Park in San Francisco, CAview map
This event is free and open to the public. Click here to RSVP.
Praise
- "This book is so good, so full of wisdom and inventive turns of phrase and perfectly insightful observation, so ruthlessly attuned to the thrilling dark heart of things, that I started to feel envious and a bit spooked and began underlining sentences on every page. . . . One of the best new collections I've read in years."—Eric Puchner
- “All I ever want to read is writing that is precise, surprising, and funny; Origin Stories has all of those qualities, and more. Corinna Vallianatos’s elegant, agile stories spark with inquiry and insight into what goes on between people, and inside ourselves.”—Rachel Khong
- “In graceful, steely prose, Origin Stories conveys Vallianatos’s unique understanding of interpersonal relationships. . . . The strength of her protagonists’ resolve and the ways in which they contend with crises are enchanting, disturbing, and provocative in turn. A superb collection.”—Camille Bordas
- “Vallianatos shines in this wide-ranging collection.”–Publishers Weekly
