Suzanne Rivecca: Death Is Not An Option

Description

celebrating the release of

Death Is Not An Option

published by W.W. Norton


A bold, dazzling debut collection about girls and women in a world where sexuality and self-delusion collide. A teacher obsesses over a student who comes to class with scratch marks on his face; a Catholic girl graduating from high school finds a warped kind of redemption in her school's contrived class rituals; a woman looking to rent a house is sucked into a strangely inappropriate correspondence with her landlord—these are just a few of the powerful plotlines in Suzanne Rivecca’s gorgeously wrought debut collection. From a college student who adopts a false hippie persona to find love to a young memoirist who bumps up against a sexually obsessed fan, the characters in these fiercely original tales grapple with what it means to be honest with themselves and the world. As provocative as Mary Gaitskill’s Bad Behavior, the exuberant prose of Death Is Not an Option explodes "with piercing insight . . . illuminating the dangerous dance between victims and saviors" (Melanie Rae Thon).

Suzanne Rivecca’s fiction has appeared in Best New American Voices 2009, among other publications. A winner of the Pushcart Prize and a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, she lives in San Francisco.

What has been said about the author's work:

“Suzanne Rivecca is a wonderfully lively and fearless new writer. I greatly admired the stories in Death Is Not an Option.” — Lorrie Moore, author of A Gate at the Stairs and Birds of America

“With exquisite patience and piercing insight, Suzanne Rivecca illuminates the dangerous dance between victims and saviors. Death Is Not an Option delivers us to the edge of grief, that precarious place where the moral compass spins—where codes of love and law and religion fail. Mercy here depends on a tiger's sublime grace, our capacity to resist deeper harm, and the right of every broken being to remain silent.” — Melanie Rae Thon, author of Sweet Hearts and First, Body

“I was astonished and transported by the stories in this collection which are simultaneously hilariously funny and sharply, sometimes painfully, perceptive. I stayed up reading them late into the night because I did not want to put them down and I thought about them for a long time after I finished the last one. I think about them still.” — Emily Mitchell, author of The Last Summer of the World

“The intensity of thought and feeling in Suzanne Rivecca's stories is remarkable.... The stories are brilliant, funny, and scary. This book is a major achievement.” — Charles Baxter, author of The Soul Thief and The Feast of Love

“Suzanne Rivecca's narrators are fierce and fiercely unhappy, uncompromising, self-sabotaging, tender, lonely, and witheringly funny.... These are beautifully shaped and smart and moving stories.” — Jim Shepard, author of Like You'd Understand, Anyway

More Info

Link

http://www.citylights.com