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Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher
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English
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SING TO IT

Amy Hempel

New Stories

From legendary writer Amy Hempel, one of the most celebrated and original voices in American short fiction comes a ravishing, sometimes heartbreaking new story collection - her first in over a decade.
Amy Hempel is a master of the short story. A multiple award winner, Hempel is highly regarded among writers, reviewers, and readers of contemporary fiction. This new collection, her first since her Collected Stories published more than a decade ago, is a literary event.

These fifteen exquisitely honed stories reveal Hempel at her most compassionate and spirited, as she introduces characters, lonely and adrift, searching for connection. In "A Full-Service Shelter," a volunteer at a dog shelter tirelessly, devotedly cares for dogs on a list to be euthanized. In "Greed," a spurned wife examines her husband's affair with a glamorous, older married woman. And in "Cloudland," the longest story in the collection, a woman reckons with the choice she made as a teenager to give up her newborn infant. Quietly dazzling, these stories are replete with moments of revelation and transcendence and with Hempel's singular, startling, inimitable sentences.

Amy Hempel is the author of Sing to It, The Dog of the Marriage, Tumble Home, At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom, Reasons to Live, and the coeditor of Unleashed. Her stories have appeared in Harper's, Vanity Fair, GQ, Tin House, The Harvard Review, The Quarterly, and have been widely anthologized, including Best American Short Stories and The Best Nonrequired Reading. She teaches in the Graduate Writing Program at Bennington College, and at Stony Brook Southampton. She lives near New York City.
Available products
Book

Published 2019-03-26 by Scribner

Book

Published 2019-03-26 by Scribner

Comments

In her fifth book of fiction, the sentences are simple and the stories short, but the speed of their connection is breathtaking.

Amy Hempel Is the Master of the Minimalist Short Story. Amy Hempel's best short stories reveal how rich spareness can be.

All the tawdry details I'm dying for are in these stories, but they're given out like old sweaters without shame, without guile. Amy Hempel is the writer who makes me feel most affiliated with other humans; we are all living this way hiding, alone, obsessed and that's ok.

Hempel's great gift is that her indirection only leads us further inward, toward the place where her characters must finally reckon with themselves.

In stories that can be funny, brutal, poetic, blunt, elusive, or all of the above, this accomplished collection highlights Hempel's signature style with its condensed prose, quirky narrators, and touching, disturbing, transcendent moments.