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THE NEWS FROM SPAIN

Joan Wickersham

Seven Variations on a Love Story

In her acclaimed memoir THE SUICIDE INDEX, a National Book Award finalist, Joan Wickersham created a new form of storytelling to explore the tragedy of her father's suicide. Now in THE NEWS FROM SPAIN: Seven Variations on a Love Story, Wickersham has turned her innovation and skill to fiction.

A new kind of book not a novel or a collection of stories, but a narrative in which all the pieces have the same title, and a series of characters, like dancers in a ballet, trace and retrace eternal yet ever-changing patterns of love and longing, connection and loss. THE NEWS FROM SPAIN ranges over centuries and continents from 18th century Vienna, where Mozart and his librettist DaPonte are collaborating on their operas The Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni; to America in the 1940s, where an unusual love triangle unfolds among a doctor, a journalist, and the President's wife. A racecar driver's widow, a teacher in a prep school, a resident in a nursing home, a paralyzed dancer married to a famous choreographer all of them feel the unnerving, overwhelming force of passion and renunciation. THE NEWS FROM SPAIN conveys the power of love, and the impossibility of understanding or controlling love. It shows how we never really know what's in someone else's heart or in our own; how we continually try to explain each other and console ourselves; and how love, like storytelling, is ultimately a work of imagination. Joan Wickersham was born in New York City and grew up there and in Connecticut. She is the author of The Suicide Index: Putting My Father’s Death in Order (Harcourt 2008), a National Book Award Finalist. Her first novel, The Paper Anniversary, was published by Viking. Her fiction has appeared in magazines, and has also been published in The Best American Short Stories and other anthologies. She has published essays and reviews and her op-ed column appears regularly in The Boston Globe. She also writes frequently about architecture, including “The Lurker,” a column she created for Architecture Boston magazine. She graduated from Yale with a degree in art history, and she lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her husband and two sons.

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Book Published 2012-10-09 by Knopf

Comments

Some of the most insightful moments here are the ones in which lonely people find connection in surprising places…Wickersham is equally adept at capturing the resentment that can lie beneath the polite conversation of longtime friends…At the engagement party of a doomed couple, Wickersham has the orchestra playing ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin.’ Which to my ear seems a perfect way to characterize this collection.

Joan Wickersham's The News from Spain is a kaleidoscopic view of the subject of love. It is amazingly perceptive psychologically, a gorgeous, completely original work. I loved it. As soon as I finished it, I began to read it again.

Written with intelligence and acutely observed.

This wise and courageous and often brilliant collection of stories, written in clean, precise prose, is not only a pleasure to read, but also breaks new ground in our perceptions of what a short story can be…What Wickersham has done here should not be underestimated. THE NEWS FROM SPAIN is a wonderfully imaginative and original book that should be cherished now, as surely as it will be cherished in the future.

Joan Wickersham's brilliant The News From Spain shows, in all its twisty beauty, what a short story collection can do. The stories are gorgeous in themselves, but the way they speak to each other is truly extraordinary.

Elegantly structured, emotionally compelling fiction from novelist/memoirist Wickersham ... Short stories don’t get much better than this, and for once, the overarching framework strengthens rather than dissipates their effectiveness.

The doubts and tenderness they share with each other as they stay at home, monitoring the mail without ever openly discussing their private feelings, are excruciating—in the best ways, ones that only the finest fiction can create, because you, the reader, feel as much or more than anyone on the page, be it the private, searing heartache or the over-the-top, sloppy happiness that so often happens in real-life love. Read more...

Joan Wickersham’s well-mannered characters control their responses to disappointment with outward finesse, which makes their heartbreak all the more potent. An expert in the he-and-she of it, Wickersham turns the most exquisitely particular truths into universals. I wondered how on earth she could possibly follow The Suicide Index. Well she has. The News from Spain is brilliant.

THE NEWS FROM SPAIN by Joan Wickersham is on Kirkus Reviews’ list of best fiction books of the year! Read more...

Joan Wickersham has done it again: astonished, enchanted, and moved me, this time in an unorthodox yet classically insightful collection of stories. While each one takes the reader to a world distinctly and alluringly its own, all seven tales come together at the end in a shimmering constellation. Like Alice Munro at her best, Wickersham sees almost too well how the choices we make in our many relationships--with parents, spouses, lovers, teachers, friends; even a chance acquaintance--steer our lives in unpredictable, sometimes shocking ways.

Do not mistake Wickersham's exquisitely polished prose for good manners. Although the novelist and memoirist writes with an almost grave formality, a vintage grace (I mean that as a compliment), she is brutal and funny too, so that the stories' tension is heightened by one's awareness that the author is always on the verge of a startling observation.

Love – and all its messy, gorgeous, decimating complications – animates this brilliantly conceived collection of stories. With astonishing acuity, Wickersham illuminates not only our passions but also our abiding consolations.

Desire is literature’s great subject, and yet so rarely can a writer come close to describing the real thing. In The News from Spain, Joan Wickersham has achieved something miraculous: seven prismatic stories that refract the lonely, marvelous, terrible complexity of human longing. These tales of love’s various facets are radiant with insight. I read them with joy and astonishment.