Doll Palace

by Sara Lippmann

Overview

In this brilliantly rendered, LA Times Book Prize nominated debut collection (as well as Longlisted for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award), Sara Lippmann draws the reader into the intimate lives of characters seeking connection beyond their scripted worlds. She captures the beguiling transformation from child to adult with humor, heartache, and desperation. From grieving mothers to fathers adrift, old flames to restless teens, isolated characters in Doll Palace are united by conflicting desires and the private struggles of the heart.

A girl ditches her innocence at a state fair. Strippers ponder love over a Brazilian wax. A father falls for a drug-addled babysitter. A mother ends a pregnancy. Doll Palace dwells in the harder-edged territories of human compassion, navigating the powerful, often unsettling ground rarely spoken of with awareness, care, and grace.

In this debut collection previously published by Dock Street Press, Doll Palace is that rare collection that invites imitation but leaves a vast majority wondering how she did it.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781736176771
Publisher:	7.13 Books
Publication date:	03/01/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	712 KB

About the Author

Sara received a BA from Brown and an MFA from The New School. She has written for national magazines, co-hosted the Sunday Salon, a monthly reading series in New York's East Village, and taught creative writing at Rutgers University, St. Joseph's College and with Ditmas Writing Workshops. Her stories have been published in Tupelo Quarterly, Joyland, Jewish Fiction, The Good Men Project, Slice Magazine, and elsewhere, nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and included in Wigleaf's Top 50. She is a former mentor for Girls Write Now and received a 2012 Fellowship in Fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Raised outside of Philadelphia, she lives with her husband and children in Brooklyn. Her debut story collection, Doll Palace (Dock Street Press), was long-listed for the 2015 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. Her collection, JERKS, is forthcoming from Mason Jar Press in 2022.

Editorial Reviews

09/22/2014
Lippmann's debut is a terrific collection of short stories that mostly take place in or around New York. In "Queen of Hearts," the male narrator feels an affinity for Pam, a babysitter in her thirties, even after she steals the bottle of Xanax that he'd been sharing with her. Lippmann skillfully demonstrates how he relates to Pam in subtle instances; he observes how she surreptitiously feels herself under her shirt ("Anything can be a transitional object") and casts his own wife in an unflattering light: "Things are not moving fast enough for Marcy. She swats me aside and jumps in, barking." "Everyone Has Your Best Interests at Heart," told from the point of view of a teenager working with her best friend on the Jersey Shore, is particularly engaging, as is "Body Scan," which chronicles what a woman learns about her husband after looking through his phone while they're stuck in traffic en route to Westchester. Some are very brief slice-of-life vignettes: the delightful "Houseboy," about a 23-year-old Israeli is rife with funny malapropisms ("At night, everything is awesome and pacifist.") but never makes fun at its narrator. These stories clearly reveal Lippmann's talent, and indicate a bright future ahead. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

2014-07-30
Past traumas bleed into present experiences in Lippmann's stark, occasionally enigmatic debut collection.A divorced slacker dad, good in his teenage son's eyes only for beer runs and his not-too-attentive chaperonage of a ski trip, remains haunted by the car crash that killed his best friend ("The Last Resort"). Ten years after her toddler brother fell into an empty swimming pool and died before her eyes, the narrator of "Everyone Has Your Best Interests at Heart" is still punishing herself, listlessly going through the motions in a dead-end summer job, with no plans now that she's graduated high school, and taking up with the vaguely creepy host of a reptile show. Parenthood only brings more woe; in both "Jew" and "All This Happiness," thoughts of their terminally ill babies shadow the protagonists' actions. The settled moms of "Body Scan" and "Reunion" seem nostalgic for their wild, pre-kid days, while the embittered divorcée of "Doll Palace" says of her once-adored ex, "[e]veryone falls short in real life." Lippmann writes well about damaged lives and ambivalent relationships, and she displays a knack for crafting mildly surreal scenarios that reveal the characters' fragile emotional states ("Starter Home," "Talisman"). She also has a weakness for abruptly ringing down the curtain on her stories with jarring developments left ostentatiously unexplained ("The Best of Us," "Queen of Hearts," "Babydollz"). This taste for obfuscation is balanced by sharp observations of the social landscape: The mother crankily guiding two girls through endless lines at Doll Palace, the "overpriced and unopposed retailer of all things doll," or the restless wife attending the funeral of a high school boyfriend, passing "identical stucco townhomes with plastic play yards out front where apparently half of the entire class lived and screwed each other and worked to make ends meet." Smart and technically accomplished fiction that is sometimes a bit too self-consciously artful.

Kirkus Reviews