BkMk Press Books

Living Arrangements

Fiction

by Laura Walter

Price: $15.95, 175 pages

ISBN: 9781886157804, 2011

 

Winner of the G.S. Sharat Chandra Prize for Short Fiction, selected by Robert Olen Butler

Gold Medal, Independent Publisher Book Awards (IPPY)

Silver Medal, ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year

Winner, USABookNews.com Best Book Award

 

Editorial Reviews

Walter’s debut collection … focuses on the significance of memory and place, the challenges of being an independent woman in the modern world, and struggles with death and grief … The collection offers well-crafted and keen entertainment.

— Publishers Weekly

Laura Maylene Walter’s first book is a collection of fine and finely unsettling stories. In these wonderfully written little tempests, the characters possess a keen but rarely bitter clarity about the losses and accommodations that life demands. I continue to marvel at the way will and intent mesh in them, long after I put the book down.

— Kristin Ohlson, author of Stalking the Divine, co-author of Kabul Beauty School

"Laura Walter writes with thoughtful compassion, and has a keen eye for finding the poetry in everyday life. Beneath the seemingly ordinary surfaces of her characters, she uncovers powerful emotional truth."

— Dan Chaon,  author of Await Your Reply and Stay Awake

Fiction. This collection of 13 stories feature characters, especially young women, who redefine their sense of belonging by reconciling with their pasts. Whether it is a plain looking woman winning ungainly notoriety as a lingerie window model, a young figure skater being lured by a stalker, or a daughter examining her mother's accidental death at a horse farm, these stories' protagonists surprise themselves and the reader by finding their places in the world through unpredictable turns. "Walter's first book is a collection of fine and finely unsettling stories"—Kristin Ohlson.