Senseless Women

by Sarah Harris Wallman

Overview

Exploring the darker side of optimism, Sarah Harris Wallman's debut collection shows women attempting to build durable havens from reality, struggling to keep relationships intact, and reinventing themselves. A lonely music teacher at a Nashville Christian academy awaits the miracle of love; a Jane Doe recalls the affair that sustained, and ended, her; a new mother brings life into the world during a bleak election party; young girls are exploited by a nightclub owner in death, as in life. Alone or in weird sisterhood, some of these women are senseless because they refuse to feel, others because they've been deprived of stimuli and attention. As these twelve stories prove, there's no sensible way to fall in love, raise children, or escape. This is Senseless Women.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781625345189
Publisher:	University of Massachusetts Press
Publication date:	03/27/2020
Series:	Juniper Prize for Fiction
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

SARAH HARRIS WALLMAN's stories have been published in such venues as Hobart and the Masters Review, and have won awards from Prada and the Tucson Festival of Books. She grew up in Nashville and currently lives in New Haven, Connecticut, where she is codirector of the MFA program in writing at Albertus Magnus College.

Table of Contents

The Dead Girls Show 1

One Car Hooks into the Next and Pulls 22

North of Eden 36

The Malanesian 41

Junk Food 61

Only Children 76

Dusty Hunting 97

Forbidden Fruit 102

Waiting for the Miracle: Scenes from the New Brochure 122

The Dog Sense 149

Senseless Women 166

Birth Stories 185

Acknowledgments 199

What People are Saying About This

Robert Yune

The stories in Senseless Women are sharp, pushing at the edges of reality to highlight the delightful absurdities of contemporary life. Just when you think you have this collection nailed down, it offers an unexpected pivot or yet another heartbreakingly perfect sentence. With a wonderful sense of variety and a wry sense of humor, Sarah Harris Wallman expertly maps out the madness, joy, and complexities of belonging.

Noy Holland

The dead commingle with the living in these stories, the animate with the inanimate, the mythic with the literal, the comedic with the grave. Vibrant, wounded, bewildered people somehow find their way through the carnival of twenty-first century America — land of Dino-Golf and Slip 'N Slide and vending machines and Zoinks. Senseless Women is a marvel.

Editorial Reviews

"Being a woman is no walk in the park in this debut collection of intricately plotted, sometimes fabulist stories . . . [This is] imaginative work that shows how much women deserve better plots."—Kirkus Reviews

"[B]ewitching and macabre . . . Wallman's incisive writing and bold choices make this memorable and worthwhile."—Publishers Weekly

"The dead commingle with the living in these stories, the animate with the inanimate, the mythic with the literal, the comedic with the grave. Vibrant, wounded, bewildered people somehow find their way through the carnival of twenty-first century America—land of Dino-Golf and Slip 'N Slide and vending machines and Zoinks. Senseless Women is a marvel."—Noy Holland, Juniper Prize for Fiction judge and author of I Was Trying to Describe What It Feels Like

"The stories in Senseless Women are sharp, pushing at the edges of reality to highlight the delightful absurdities of contemporary life. Just when you think you have this collection nailed down, it offers an unexpected pivot or yet another heartbreakingly perfect sentence. With a wonderful sense of variety and a wry sense of humor, Sarah Harris Wallman expertly maps out the madness, joy, and complexities of belonging."—Robert Yune, author of Impossible Children

From the Publisher

2020-01-13
Being a woman is no walk in the park in this debut collection of intricately plotted, sometimes fabulist stories.

Women suffer, Wallman suggests, whether because they're concerned mothers, jealous lovers, or dieting wives. Sometimes men are the source of this pain, but often women are to blame. In "The Dead Girls Show," dead women (like the Hanged Girl and Arabella, the anorexic) put on a ghastly show where men can come and ogle their emaciated bodies and broken necks. But it's the no-nonsense strippers who see the dead girls as a threat and beat them up. Competition among women is also at the heart of "Senseless Women." A nurse named Miriam becomes obsessed with a patient who speaks incessantly even though she has lost her mind. As their histories merge, it becomes clear that Miriam's fallen prey to jealousy and drifted from her family. Plot twists and aha moments drive many of these pieces, sometimes successfully, as in "The Malanesian," which moves between the story of a runaway teenager and that of an affluent couple and their foreign maid until the two narratives come together with a satisfying pop. In "Only Children," however, a plot swerve cheapens an otherwise shrewd exploration of stepparenting. Indeed, when Wallman hews closer to realism, she shows off her considerable talent for expressing things dangerously thorny and fiercely true. In "Junk Food," which is about nothing more and nothing less than a mother spending the night with her ailing newborn, the protagonist reckons, "She did not wish she was in Italy. She did not unwish the baby. She was caught in the suffering of wanting to wish these things, wanting even to remember them clearly, and running up against a blockage of pain knitted from love and hormones."

Imaginative work that shows how much women deserve better plots.

Kirkus Reviews