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GIRLS OF A CERTAIN AGE (Little, Brown, Feb 2021)
Lorrie Moore meets Ottessa Moshfegh in this darkly playful and subversive debut story collection exploring the many impossible choices that accompany 21st century femaleness. What is the right way to handle an abusive partner? An unexpected pregnancy? A toxic friendship? Chronic unemployment? Gender dysphoria? A family member going to war? A disability? Anger? Loneliness? Finding themselves in various kinds of disempowering, frightening, or otherwise unendurable circumstances, the girls and women in Maria Adelmann's stories look for ways to free themselves into new lives or, at the very least, new states of feeling. Sometimes they do this by hurting someone else or getting hurt; sometimes by submitting, other times by mounting a rebellion. With a special talent for pressing the sharp up against the tender, Adelmann explores the many pathways through the titular condition. Ranging in style from the magical to the terrifying to the calm tones of a self-help manual, Girls of a Certain Age captures the spectrum of strategies we apply to the pain of life, strategies that we persist in pretending might actually work. ABOUT MARIA ADELMANN Maria's stories have been published in Tin House, The Threepenny Review, the Indiana Review, Epoch, AQR, and MQR, among other magazines. Her humor pieces and essays have appeared in places like McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and n+1's MFA vs. NYC. She has worked as a visual merchandiser, hotel reviewer, product tester, and painter, and has also taught writing while sailing around the world. She has an MFA in fiction from The University of Virginia and lives in Baltimore. You can follow her on Twitter or Instagram. |
