Vendor
	Fritz Agency Christian Dittus
Original language
English

WHEN WATCHED

Leopoldine Core

Stories

A sly, provocative, and psychologically astute debut story collection from a 2015 Whiting Award winner

In Leopoldine Core's stories, you never know where you are going to end up. Populated by sex workers and artists, lovers and friends, her characters are endlessly striving to understand each other. And while they may seem to operate at the margins, there is something eminently relatable, even elemental about their romantic relationships, their personal demons, and the strange shapes their joy can take.

Refreshing, witty, and absolutely close to the heart, Core's twenty stories, set in and around New York City, have an other-worldly quality along with a deep seriousnesseven a moral seriousness. What we know of identity is smashed and in its place, true individuals emerge, each bristling with a unique sexuality, a belief-system all their own. Reminiscent of Jane Bowles, William Burroughs, and Colette, her writing glows with an authenticity that is intoxicating and rare.

Dirty and squalid, poetic and pure, Core bravely tunnels straight to the center of human suffering and longing. This collection announces a daring and deeply sensitive new voice.

Leopoldine was born and raised in Manhattan and attended Hunter College. She's been an Emerging Writer Fellow at The Center for Fiction and The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Open City, The Drunken Boat, The Brooklyn Rail, among others. She is at work on a novel and When Watched is her first book.

Available products
Book Published 2016-08-01 by Penguin Press

Comments

There is an incredible sense of place and character in her stories, a completely original world that one feels one is inhabiting, a feeling similar to the sensation of reading Paula Fox or Jane Bowles. I cannot think of another young writer I have come across in whom I have as much faith to make work that will be read, and read for a long time, as Leopoldine Core. - Sheila Heti

Core is a master raconteur and organizes all of her tales around objects and places (most take place in a bedroom or in transit); she captures a quintessential New York cynicismone punctuated with hopeless romanticism, stress, and hyperstimulation. But the cynicism also produces pure moments of bliss Entrancing, subtle, and tragically poetic, this collection is an important contribution to queer literature. (starred review)

Italy: Clichy

Shortlist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction ($25,000): To an author whose debut worka first novel or collection of short stories published in 2016represents distinguished literary achievement and suggests great promise. -- Judges: Jami Attenberg, Tawni Nandini Islam, Randall Kenan, Hanna Pyalvainen, and Akhil Sharma. Read more...

The tart, muted tone of Core's narrative voice has earned her comparisons to Mary Gaitskill, Jane Bowles and even William Burroughs, but these references don't do justice to the intimacy and relative gentleness with which the author treats her group of modern, often millennial drifters [Core] reaches moments of extraordinary grace.

Winner of the Whiting Award for Fiction ($50.000). From the Jury: "There is such a powerful understatement to these stories, though the emotional register, and the stakes, are always high. The heart is ignited, kicked into gear by Core's dialogue, and by all of the audible silences running through this work." Read more...