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.
About the Author
Laura Maylene Walter is the recipient of many awards, including the 2010 G.S. Sharat Chandra Prize for Short Fiction, as judged by Robert Olen Butler; Ohioana Library Association's Walter Rumsey Marvin grant, awarded annually to an Ohio writer age 30 or under; and Washington College's Sophie Kerr Prize, the nation's largest undergraduate literary award. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Poets & Writers, The Writer, Inkwell, American Literary Review, Ohioana Quarterly, Flyway, Crab Creek Review, South Dakota Review, and elsewhere, and her novel-in-progress, Opal, was named a runner-up in the 2010 James Jones First Novel Fellowship. Most recently, she is the author of LIVING ARRANGEMENTS (BkMk Press, 2011). Laura grew up in Lancaster, PA, and has resided in the Cleveland area since 2004. She works as an editor of a trade magazine and lives with her husband and their two cats in Lakewood, Ohio.
Published 2011
Stories
Excellent reading for those who value meditative, beautiful storytelling.—Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal (starred review) ...
Poems
In this collection of linked sonnets, a young woman wrestles with the expectations of her repressive upbringing and Southern culture. Raised by a jaded and critical mother and haunted by an absent father, she constructs the myths and truths ...
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