This Will Be Difficult to Explain: And Other Stories - Softcover

Skibsrud, Johanna

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393345920 ISBN 13: 9780393345926

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2013

Synopsis

Nine loosely connected, hypnotic stories about memory and desire showcase one of fiction's bright new voices.

In the Scotiabank Giller Prize–winning author Johanna Skibsrud’s new book, nine loosely connected and hypnotic stories introduce an unforgettable cast of characters. A young maid at a hotel in France encounters a man who asks to paint her portrait, only later discovering that the man is someone other than who she thinks. A divorced father, fearing estrangement from his thirteen-year-old daughter, allows her to take the wheel of his car, realizing too late that he’s made a grave mistake. A Canadian girl and her French host stumble on the one story that transcends their language barrier. Youth confronted with the mutterings of old age, restlessness bounded by the muddy confines of a backyard garden, callow hope coming up against the exigencies of everyday life―these are life-defining moments that weave throughout the everyday lives of the remarkable characters in this book. Time and again they find themselves confronted with what they didn’t know they didn’t know, at the exact point of intersection between impossibility and desire. In This Will Be Difficult to Explain Skibsrud has created a series of masterful, perceptive tales.

About this title

About the Author:

Johanna Skibsrud is the author of The Sentimentalists, winner of the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and This Will Be Difficult to Explain, as well as two poetry collections. She lives in Tucson, Arizona.

Review:

“Sharp and stirring. ... [T]his subtle mixture of melancholy and world-­historical resignation...gives Skibsrud’s collection its potency.”
- Jessica Loudis, New York Times Book Review

“Like the best short fiction, Johanna Skibsrud’s new collection, This Will Be Difficult to Explain, centers on the complex and layered interior lives of ordinary people. These are the kind of stories that make you take a long, hard look at the person standing next to you at the supermarket―or even sitting across from you at the dinner table―and wonder what unspoken oddities are floating around in his or her head. . . . The quality of Skibsrud’s writing is undeniable.”
- Washington Independent Review

“Beguiling. . . . [Skibsrud] brings to these stories a poet’s eye and the subtle shadings of some of our best practitioners, including Marilynne Robinson and Alice Munro.”
- Library Journal

“Skibsrud’s economical, poetically aware stories reveal a writer comfortable with the form, and one who requires her readers to think.”
- Kirkus Reviews

“[Johanna Skibsrud’s] prose is as taut as Alice Munro’s, her plots as spare as Mavis Gallant’s. Her characters have startlingly vivid inner lives...Skibsrud’s new book is just as assured [as her novel], and it has the same emotional punch.”
- Toronto Life

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0393345920
• ISBN 13: 9780393345926
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 176