Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English

GOOD WOMEN

Halle Hill

In her dynamic debut, Halle Hill's Good Women delves into the lives of twelve Black women across the Appalachian South.

There's a woman boarding a Greyhound bus to meet her sugar daddy's mother; a state fair employee considering revenge on a local preacher; a sister struggling with guilt as she helps her brother plan to run away with a man he's secretly seeing, and a young woman who works for a scam for-profit college navigating the lies she sells for a living.

Dark, funny and deeply human, Hill observes how place, blood-ties, generational trauma, obsession, and boundaries - or lack thereof - influence how we navigate our worlds, and how these worlds so often collide in ways we don't expect. Through intimate moments of personal choice, she carefully shines a light on how these women shape and form themselves through faith and abandon, transgression and conformity, community, caution, and solitude.

With precision and empathy, Hill captures the mundane in moments of absurdity, and bears witness to both joy and heartbreak, reminding us how the next moment could be life-changing.

HALLE HILL is a PEN/Dau Short Story Prize nominee, winner of the 2021 Crystal Wilkinson Creative Writing Prize, and a finalist for the 2021 ASME Award for Fiction. Her work is featured in Joyland, New Limestone Review, and Oxford American among others. GOOD WOMEN is her debut collection.

Available products
Book Published 2023-09-12 by Hub City Press
Book Published 2023-09-12 by Hub City Press

Comments

Halle Hill misses nothing, sees everything--Good Women gives witness. These stories are intimate, unbound and Hill delivers them like a wrestled testimony barreling through time. Halle Hill is here, y'all. And Good Women, these stories, these lives, will last and last in all of us.

This is a collection about awareness and choosing between misery fed by willful ignorance or working toward uncertain change. Introspective and heartbreaking, Good Women showcases the interior lives of women who are near their breaking points.

Halle Hill is a major artist, one of the most astounding I know of living today. Good Women, her first collection of stories, sits dominant on the shelf next to the other classic story collections I admire. She's written a future classic. You'll see what I mean once you crack it open.

In this powerful collection, Hill gathers a chorus of women, each fumbling and fascinating in unique ways. Though the stories stand alone, together they offer a brilliant composite of what it might mean to be a Good Woman.

In Halle Hill's Good Women, we meet mothers and daughters, lovers and friends, saints and aint's - all longing for something, some place, someone. They are curious, messy, and determined, and Hill's fierce and dazzling pen lets us feel every ounce of their complicated desires. Every mistake, every realization, every triumph, every tragedy. This is a fantastic firecracker of a collection I'll return to again and again!

Characters are tormented by pregnancy (unwanted, ill-starred), weight control, evangelical faith, screwed-up mothers and fathers, and police brutality and are unable to find the comfort others do in Pema Chödrön, nontoxic cleaning supplies, or White Claw. A STUNNING SLOW BURN BRIMMING WITH OBSERVATION, EMOTION, AND INCIDENT. Read more...

Hill knows how to layer in just enough mystery and dread to keep readers invested. With a well-balanced blend of excitement and empathy, these stories are also able to handle darker topics without straying too far into melodrama.

Halle Hill gifts us an unflinching peek at women who are trying, women who are aching, women who are running their hands along the walls of their dark hearts, fumbling for the light. Important and beautifully written, this collection is alive with bite and verve tick-tick-ticking on every page.

Hill's bold narratives leverage strong interiority and voice. These stories show how sometimes being a 'good woman' is about adapting and enduring. It isn't always about achieving something admirable and fulfilling, but rather, surviving long enough so perhaps, someday, she will.

Edgy and intimate, Hill's stories form an unexpectedly cohesive series of vignettes that deliver a stunning proclamation on the modern female experience.

With humor and immediacy, Halle Hill's empathetic, feral debut story collection spotlights 12 Black women across Appalachia and the Deep South, marked by faith and abandon. Read more...

This heralds a bright new talent.

Halle Hill's debut collection features 12 Appalachian women, some impatient and impressive, others immovable and impervious - but all imperfect. They are real and relatable, as is Hill's nuanced and engaging writing. Read more...

Full of fun and tension, Good Women masters the gift of taking your characters seriously. Hill writes with whip, guiding us through the insides of Southern Black women - their weekends, their inner dialogues, their dialect, their flesh, their humaneness - all of which heightens their depth. In this unforgettable debut, Good Women (pun intended) travel viscerally, becoming trapped in your fingertips every time you turn the page.

This is a collection about awareness and choosing between misery fed by willful ignorance or working toward uncertain change. Introspective and heartbreaking, Good Women showcases the interior lives of women who are near their breaking points.