Praise:
"Pia Ehrhardt’s tender and funny stories are filled with passionate women just barely bottled up by their everyday responsibilities: busy-hearted wives and mothers who may find themselves surprised by love or their own resiliency but who never doubted for a moment the intensity of their desire to touch the world...They render for us that jumping-on-a-trampoline feeling, when our most intimate connections are the top of the bounce, and the view up there is both scary and sweet." Jim Shepard, author of Love and Hydrogen and Project X
"Pia Z. Ehrhardt's Famous Fathers is a stunning first collection. The stories charm and tease and threaten with equal fervor...To read them is to be seduced, at night and in the slanting rain, in a new city, over quiet water, by the woman of your dreams." Frederick Barthelme, author of Moon Deluxe and Natural Selection
Famous Fathers and Other Stories
Reader's Choice Simultaneous Hard Cover and Paperback ReleaseBy Pia Z. Ehrhardt
June 15, 2007ISBN: 978-1-59692-212-9
Format: Hardcover Genre: Fiction Pages: 200
Price: $19.50 Rights: U.S.; Canada; Audio Other Rights: McCormick & Williams Literary
Awards: 2005 Narrative Prize
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About the Book
A gracefully disconcerting collection of stories by the winner of the 2005 Narrative Prize.
Wavering between fidelity and freedom, the women in this sparkling debut collection deal with emotional damage and unhealed heartbreak by plunging into unusual, often bizarre, relationships.
In Pia Z. Ehrhardt’s stories, adultery and impropriety become disquietingly mundane. Mothers expect daughters to be complicit in their love affairs, children seek shelter in families that aren’t their own, fathers court their daughters, a couple enters into a marriage that lasts thirty days a year, and a young girl takes to the road with the simple guy who bags groceries at Piggly Wiggly while her mother imagines her safely at school.
Beautifully restrained and shot through with tenderness, Famous Fathers and Other Stories establishes Ehrhardt as both a leading practitioner of the short story and an empathetic interpreter of the lives of wounded people who—instead of asking for what they want—take what is offered.
Reader's Choice Simultaneous Paperback Release
ISBN: Trade Paperback: 978-1-59692-235-8
U.S.: $12.50
About the Author
Pia Z. Ehrhardt lives in New Orleans with her husband and son. Her stories have been widely published in magazines including McSweeney’s Quarterly, the Mississippi Review, and Narrative Magazine, and anthologized in A Cast of Characters and Other Stories and the 2006 Norton Anthology Sudden Fiction: Short-Shorts from America and Beyond. She is the recipient of the 2005 Narrative Prize. "Author's Website