Mendocino Fire : Stories
Author(s): Elizabeth Tallent
In this collection of richly imagined stories, Elizabeth Tallent, the master of short fiction, delivers a diverse suite of stories about men and women confronting their vulnerabilities in times of transition and challenge.
Beginning in the 1980s, Elizabeth Tallent’s work appeared in some of our most prestigious literary publications, including The New Yorker, Esquire, and Harper’s. Marked by its quiet power and emotional nuance, her fiction garnered widespread praise.
Now Tallent returns with a new collection of diverse, thematically linked, and deeply powerful stories that confirm her enduring gift for capturing relationships at their moment of transformation: marriages breaking apart, people haunted by memories of old love and reaching haltingly toward new futures. Mendocino Fire explore moments of fracture and fragmentation; it limns the wilderness of our inner psyche and brilliantly evokes the electric tension of deep emotion. In these pages, Tallent explores expectations met and thwarted, and our never-ending quest to avoid being alone.
With this breathtaking collection, Elizabeth Tallent cements her rightful place in the literary pantheon beside her contemporaries Lorrie Moore, Ann Beattie, and Louise Erdrich. Visceral and surprising, profound yet elemental, Mendocino Fire is a welcome visit with a wise and familiar friend.
Review(s):
“[Tallent] brings an immense complexity and dimension to the domestic affairs of the heart. At times, these stories almost veer toward the epic, emotionally speaking, and are reminiscent of the muscular, sharp-eyed narratives of the late Robert Stone.”
“Elizabeth Tallent is, and always has been, a vivid, meticulous, and astutely inviting writer. These new stories vitally tell us how things are for us, in the most acute and memorable ways. Her ear is perfect; her gaze searing and unmistakable.”
“Enchanting. . . . Immediately engaging. . . . The ability to create characters who force us to withhold judgment and leave us gasping at their absolute, solid reality isn’t the result of any special kindness or goodness on the part of the author.
“Elizabeth Tallent’s style is so distinctive, and it’s the kind of writing I so enjoy, never obvious, full of complex thought and perception, so boldly ambitious.”
“In her fourth collection, Tallent explores the spaces between people through 10 expertly crafted stories. . . . Tallent’s collection offers a smart, thought-provoking study of desire and disappointment.”
“Tallent’s assured voice is a pleasure to follow through this book. . . . An ambitious and wide-ranging set of stories that creates empathy for most of its characters due to Tallent’s generous imagination.”
“Driving, furious, erotic, gilded, the sentences flying at you like arrows...Her book is a meditation on the state of marriage.”
“Mendocino Fire throws sparks.”
“Tallent’s characters are most nearly themselves, because of or in spite of love, and that is the rich truth of this book.”
“[Tallent writes] with a keen, quicksilver appreciation of her characters’ inner lives and with a poet’s eye for the luminous, skewed details of everyday life.”
ISBN: 9780062410351