Mending: New and Selected Stories - Softcover

Bingham, Sallie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1936747014 ISBN 13: 9781936747016

Publisher: Sarabande Books, 2011

Synopsis

Praise for Sallie Bingham:

"Sallie Bingham binds her collection together with sheer talent. The title novella is absolutely first-rate—a skillfully suggestive amalgam of Katherine Mansfield and Eudora Welty. This same unblinking gaze is hard at work on the essential weakness and dependence of men ('The Banks of the Ohio' and 'The Ice Party'), the illusion of freedom that comes with divorce ('Bare Bones'), and the desperate terror of adolescent love ('Winter Term')."—James R. Frakes, The New York Times Book Review

"Sallie Bingham's characters scrutinize their relationships with children, lovers, and their own treacherous souls. . . . Nearly every one of these flinty stories is a tiny masterpiece."—Entertainment Weekly

"Hardened but not compromised by adult life, these luminous stories . . . feature narrators who find mature, often solitary forms of reckoning, and even happiness. . . . There is not a false note in Bingham's striking collection."—Publishers Weekly, starred review

"These engaging tales span landscape, gender, and age, and readers will treasure Bingham's strikingly perceptive composition and refined, clever flashes of detail and clarity."—Booklist

Sallie Bingham published her first novel with Houghton Mifflin in 1961. Since then she has published four collections of short stories, four novels, and a memoir. She was book editor for The Courier-Journal in Louisville, Kentucky, and has been a director of the National Book Critics Circle. She is the founder of The Kentucky Foundation for Women.

About this title

About the Author:

Sallie Bingham published her first novel with Houghton Mifflin in 1961. Since then she has published four collections of short stories, four novels, and a memoir. She was Book Editor for The Courier-Journal in Louisville and has been a director of the National Book Critics Circle. She is the founder of The Kentucky Foundation for Women.

Review:

Spanning 50 years, this omnibus of Bingham’s tight, sparkling short fiction includes stories from her earliest collection, The Touching Hand (1967), to her latest, Red Car (2008). The title story that opens the collection demonstrates the attention to detail and skillfully rendered emotional tension that characterize Bingham’s work. . . . Bingham’s work, including favorites such as The Wedding” and Sweet Peas,” remains sharp and deliciously unsettling, ripe for discovery by a new generation of readers.”
Publishers Weekly (starred review)

This collection of new and selected stories spans work from 1967 to the present by an important writer who is too little known. These stories are remarkable for their economy of language and for the author’s ability, within a small frame, to allow the undefined but intense emotion of a central character (male or female, young or old) to sharpen in focus to the point at which both reader and character share the surprise of insight.”
Sue Russell, Library Journal

"The layers of the unspoken in Bingham's stories afford them the repleteness of novellas, belying their accessible surfaces, which are as absorbing as gossip. . . . Selected from five decades' work, these stories distill the mysterious glow that lives emanate as they recede into the past, and confirm Bingham's place in the front rank of practitioners of this elusive genre."
The New Yorker


“Spanning 50 years, this omnibus of Bingham’s tight, sparkling short fiction includes stories from her earliest collection, The Touching Hand (1967), to her latest, Red Car (2008). The title story that opens the collection demonstrates the attention to detail and skillfully rendered emotional tension that characterize Bingham’s work. . . . Bingham’s work, including favorites such as “The Wedding” and “Sweet Peas,” remains sharp and deliciously unsettling, ripe for discovery by a new generation of readers.”
―Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“This collection of new and selected stories spans work from 1967 to the present by an important writer who is too little known. These stories are remarkable for their economy of language and for the author’s ability, within a small frame, to allow the undefined but intense emotion of a central character (male or female, young or old) to sharpen in focus to the point at which both reader and character share the surprise of insight.”
―Sue Russell, Library Journal

"The layers of the unspoken in Bingham's stories afford them the repleteness of novellas, belying their accessible surfaces, which are as absorbing as gossip. . . . Selected from five decades' work, these stories distill the mysterious glow that lives emanate as they recede into the past, and confirm Bingham's place in the front rank of practitioners of this elusive genre."
―The New Yorker

About this edition

• Publisher: Sarabande Books
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1936747014
• ISBN 13: 9781936747016
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288