Ridgway Public Library

Finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction
"[These stories] vibrate with originality, queerness, sensuality and the strange."—Roxane Gay
"In these formally brilliant and emotionally charged tales, Machado gives literal shape to women's memories and hunger and desire. I couldn't put it down."—Karen Russell
In Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado blithely demolishes the arbitrary

...

"In this stirring, reflective collection of short stories, Joyce Carol Oates ponders alternate destinies: the other lives we might have led if we'd made different choices. An accomplished writer returns to her childhood home of Yewville, but the homecoming stirs troubled thoughts about the person she might have been if she'd never left. A man in prison contemplates the gravity of his irreversible act. A student's affair with a professor results in...

Fen is a liminal land. Real people live their lives here. They wrestle with familiar instincts, with sex and desire, with everyday routine. But the wild is always close at hand, ready to erupt. This is a place where animals and people commingle and fuse, where curious metamorphoses take place, where myth and dark magic still linger. So here a teenager may starve herself into the shape of an eel. A house might fall in love with a girl. A woman might...

The residents of Clayton, Colorado, must learn to live with what has burned and what threatens to ignite. In Defensible Spaces, a bus driver confronts a rush of memories when an old flame climbs aboard; a trailer park resident attempts to save her home; a reclusive fire mitigation worker fuels public outrage. Throughout ten linked short stories, townspeople work through relationships with alcoholism, history, and each other, negotiating where and...

In the nine expansive, searching stories of A Lucky Man, fathers and sons attempt to salvage relationships with friends and family members and confront mistakes made in the past. An imaginative young boy from the Bronx goes swimming with his group from day camp at a backyard pool in the suburbs, and faces the effects of power and privilege in ways he can barely grasp. A teen intent on proving himself a man through the all-night revel of J'Ouvert can't...

A troubled teenaged Indian orphan, about to commit a massive act of violence, finds himself traveling back and forth through time in search of his true identity, stopping at such places as an Idaho reservation in the early 1970s and the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

When college sophomore Laurel Estabrook is attacked while riding her bicycle through Vermont's back roads, her life is forever changed. Formerly outgoing, Laurel withdraws into her photography and begins to work at a homeless shelter. There she meets Bobbie Crocker, a man with a history of mental illness and a box of photographs that he won't let anyone see. When Bobbie dies suddenly, Laurel discovers that he was telling the truth: before he was homeless,...

On a fateful December day, a cancer victim plotting suicide saves a disturbed boy at a frozen lake in the title story of this collection. Other stories feature an attempted kidnapping and find a soldier's return from war both meaningful and humorous.

Albert Honigs most constant companions have always been his bees. A never-married octogenarian, he makes a modest living as a beekeeper, as his father and his fathers father did before him. Deeply acquainted with the workings of the hives, Albert is less versed in the ways of people, especially his friend Claire, whose presence and absence in his life have never been reconciled. When Claire is killed in a seemingly senseless accident during a burglary...

Deep in the forests of the Pacific Northwest, a mill town called Commonwealth votes to quarantine itself in the wake of the 1918 flu pandemic, but a violent confrontation with a tired, hungry, and cold soldier will have devastating repercussions for the entire town.