Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Categories
Biography, Literature & Literary studies

CRIMINALS

Valerie Trueblood

Love Stories

Valerie Trueblood is, simply put, one of the finest story writers who is currently working in the American language, as prize committees acknowledge. In this, her beautifully made third collection, each of the fifteen stories asks two defining questions: • What kind of love story is this? • Who here is exactly what kind of criminal?

In “His Rank,” an armed man enters a bar to claim the girl he understands to be his destiny only to be told she has, the weekend before, married someone else. In “Skylab,” in which lovers have run away together to work medical relief in Malaysia, the young woman is reading the Koran to learn what it says about adulterers even as she waits for satellite debris to rain down on her. She’ll be punished, won’t she, for the crime of happiness? And in “The Bride of the Black Duck” a new widow falls in love with an entire complicated family in her neighborhood, with whom she’s suddenly, irrevocably plighted her troth: she is theirs, just as they are hers. With her keen eye, her fabulous ear and her generous heart, Trueblood’s aim is to find characters in moments of true extremity when they are united in. Valerie Trueblood is a co-trustee of the Denise Levertov Literary Trust and is a contributing editor of The American Poetry Review. Her novel, Seven Loves, was selected for Barnes & Noble’s Discover Great New Writers program. She lives in Seattle, WA.

Available products
Book Published 2016-01-12 by Counterpoint

Comments

Utterly exquisite. An achingly beautiful portrayal of a woman’s life and loves and losses.

Criminals is a passionate reminder of how love can make us capable of anything. Valerie Trueblood is writing among the most exquisite stories in the English language today, full of candor, sly wit, and emotional range. She is ever mindful of the ways in which we willfully confuse pleasure and torment, recklessness and ardent devotion—and why we ultimately turn to stories for consolation.

Intense, complicated short stories about intense, complicated people....Trueblood's collection feels like a condensed version of a novel, dense with incident and crowded with fully realized characters. They unfold quickly, with frequent flashbacks and sidelong observations so insightful they are almost distracting. You have to read them carefully, or read them twice, to get the full effect....A seasoned, deeply knowing writer with riches to share.

The diamond-sharp stories in Trueblood’s second collection dazzle...Trueblood tells these stories from unusual angles, with precision and a depth of insight and empathy that enfold the reader into the characters’ lives.

Her writing is bursting with a genuine violence of health and strength of will that make each of her stories so engaging. What I love most about her writing is how her stories are, at once bittersweet, joyful and mournful in equal measure.