Emergency, Kathleen Alcott
Emergency, Kathleen Alcott
List: $15.99 | Sale: $11.20
Club: $7.99

Emergency
Stories

Author: Kathleen Alcott

Narrator: Carolyn Jania

Unabridged: 6 hr 15 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 07/25/2023


Synopsis

From an "exquisite" (The New Yorker) writer, a searing volume of prizewinning stories starring women facing points of no return.

A professor finds a photograph of her deceased mother in a compromising position on the wall of a museum. A twenty-something's lucrative remote work sparks paranoia and bigotry. A transplant to a new city must make a choice about who she trusts when her partner reveals a violent history. The summer after her divorce from an older man, an exiled painter's former friends grapple with rumors that she attempted to pass as a teenager.

In this long-awaited debut collection, Kathleen Alcott turns her skills as a stylist on the unfreedoms of American life—as well as the guilt that stalks those who survive them. Emergency roams from European cities to scorched California towns, drug-smeared motel rooms to polished dinner parties, taking taut, surprising portraits of addiction, love, misogyny, and sexual power. Confronting the hidden perils of class ascension, the women in these stories try to pay down the psychic debts of their old lives as they search for a new happiness they can afford.

About Kathleen Alcott

Kathleen Alcott is the author of three critically acclaimed novels, including Infinite Home. Shortlisted for the Sunday Times Short Story Award, her short fiction has also been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories 2019 and The Best Short Stories 2023: The O. Henry Prize Winners. She has taught at Columbia University and Bennington College, and her work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Guardian, Harper's Magazine, and elsewhere.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Oriol on May 09, 2024

Great story diving into the events that followed Sharpville's massacre. A big "must" to understand Apartheid from a colored high-school teacher's perspective.......more

Goodreads review by Jarret on May 07, 2017

A book about the aftermath of the Sharpville protests and massacre, as seen through the eyes of a South African "coloured" teacher. To be sure, "coloured" is the politically-correct term for a racial category that is neither "white" nor "black" nor "mixed." (For an outstanding description, see Trevo......more

Goodreads review by Jako on August 23, 2019

Story set around the Sharpeville Massacre following a coloured teacher......more

Goodreads review by Ian on November 19, 2020

South African classic related to the not so distant past. Fictional but relating lived experience of an author under apartheid. Highly recommended for insights into the South African psyche.......more