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

SINGLE, CAREFREE, MELLOW

Katherine Heiny

Stories

A glittering, tender, and ruefully funny debut, SINGLE, CAREFREE, MELLOW examines the varieties of betrayal in ten exquisite stories of women falling in and out of love.

Maya, who we first meet in the title story, is torn between the reliability of her kind, careful boyfriend Rhodes, and the allure of her married boss. In “Andorra,” Sadie’s lover, Marcus, calls her every Thursday as he drives to meet his wife at marriage counseling. In “How to Give the Wrong Impression” Gwen pines after her roommate, Boris, a man who will hold her hand but then tell her it is sweaty in a tone that crushes her like a grape. And in “The Dive Bar” Sasha’s lover’s wife asks to meet her for a drink, and Sasha agrees, hating to be rude to the woman whose husband she has stolen. Smart, sexy, and disarming, these are stories about the ways we are unfaithful to one another, on purpose and by accident. Stories from the collection have been published in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Narrative and The Alaska Quarterly Review, among other places. Katherine Heiny’s fiction has been anthologized in Nothing But You: Love Stories From The New Yorker, presented on Selected Shorts, optioned by Merchant-Ivory and HBO, and performed off-Broadway. She received her MFA from Columbia University and won the Henfield/Transatlantic award. She has also written YA novels. She lives in Washington, D.C. with her family.

Available products
Book Published 2015-02-01 by Knopf

Comments

Single, Carefree, Mellow is a book about heartache, adultery, love, and loss that somehow manages to be both laugh-out-loud funny and wise, sometimes in the very same sentence. It’s full of lines so smart and sharp that I was compelled to stop and read them out loud to my friends. This book is amazing, brilliant, and nothing short of wonderful.

Formed of ten exquisitely-composed stories (all featuring women in various states of love), Heiny's book takes a disarming and wry look at the inherent nature of betrayal and secrets within relationships.

UK: Fourth Estate Italy: Einaudi/Stile Libero

Funny and heartfelt… Few characters are single and even fewer are carefree—though most long to be. Instead, they are remorseful about their disloyalties, torn between spouses and secret lovers, and guilt-ridden over the betrayals they commit in the name of love... Maya, who appears in several more stories in various stages of life and love, is one of many captivating characters expertly imagined by Heiny… An exceptionally humorous collection by a talented new writer.

Katherine Heiny where have you been all my life? Single, Carefree, Mellow is among the most insightful, funny, and smart collections I’ve read in a very long time...

Katherine Heiny's work does something magical: elevates the mundane so that it has the stakes of a mystery novel, gives women's interior lives the gravity they so richly deserve -- and makes you laugh along the way.