"An impressive collection of 18 short stories that are both
daring and intimate. The precision of description is exquisite
throughout. Bound neither by reality nor time, Little's stories
span generations, countries, even species, smartly blending conventional
themes and dramatic flair."
--Publishers
Weekly (February 3, 1997)
Sometimes dark, sometimes humorous, and always generous with
reading pleasure, Geraldine Little's new book, Woman in a
Special House, is full of stories about real people
and real lives, playing with the line between sanity and insanity,
reality and fantasy. Like real life, they make us ponder circumstances,
their possibilities and their outcomes.
Little's house has windows that look out on many scenes, and
she skillfully enters the psyches of a wide variety of people:
a woman whose dream disappeared in the bombing of Hiroshima,
a woman haunted by the memory of her husband in beautiful Castine,
Maine, a girl undone by her mother's last illness, an adolescent
girl who is not raped by her father, how a woman is not
trapped by her sick body.
To enter this collection is to be willing to be moved by words
with incisive bite and an eye that penetrates to bone. At the
end of each startling story, the reader is left with new insights-and
sometimes new questions-about the human condition.
About the Author: Geraldine
Clinton Little has published ten books, and her stories and poems
have appeared in over 400 journals, including Paris Review,
Prairie Schooner, Poetry Northwest and The Hudson
Review. She has been Vice President of the Poetry Society
of America, a Fellow of the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo, and a
member of PEN International. She is the recipient of many prestigious
awards, including The Pablo Neruda Award from Nimrod,
The Charles Angoff Award from The Literary Review, and
The Charles & Sarah Bosworth Jones Award from Blue Unicorn.
Her work has been translated into Polish, Japanese, Chinese,
French, and German.
