JERKS

by Sara Lippmann

Overview

With JERKS, Sara Lippmann rides the proverbial clutch between wanting and having. Ambivalent mothers, aging suburbanites, restless teens, survivalist parents, and disaffected wives—desire is a live wire, however frayed, a reminder that life, for all its sputtering stall outs, is still worth living. The messy characters in these eighteen stories may hack up their bed sheets with group sex, anonymous sex, sexual history, infidelity, and a literal handsaw, but there's tenderness, too, among the lust and rage. Even when fantasy offers a shortcut to oneself, without connection, it's a lonely escape. With crisp precision, ample honesty and desperate humor, Lippmann delivers an irresistibly fraught cast of characters at various stages of undress.

Fiction. Women's Studies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781951853105
Publisher:	Mason Jar Press
Publication date:	03/22/2022
Pages:	154
Product dimensions:	5.75(w) x 7.95(h) x 0.47(d)

About the Author

Sara Lippmann is the author of the story collection Doll Palace (Dock Street Press), long-listed for the 2015 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. She was awarded an artist's fellowship in fiction from New York Foundation for the Arts, and her work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Millions, Fourth Genre, Slice Magazine, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Diagram, Squalorly and elsewhere. She's landed on Wigleaf's Top 50, and her stories have been anthologized in Mamas and Papas: On the Sublime and Heartbreaking Art of Parenting (San Diego City Works Press) and forthcoming in New Voices: Contemporary Voices Confronting the Holocaust (Blue Lyra Press) and Best Small Fictions 2020 (Sonder Press). Raised outside of Philadelphia, she teaches in Brooklyn where she lives with her family and co-hosts the Sunday Salon NYC. Find her on twitter @saralippmann.

Editorial Reviews

★ 01/24/2022

Lippmann’s tantalizing collection (after Doll Palace) offers a set of character studies fraught with longing. The bittersweet “Wolf or Deer” depicts young girls at summer camp playing Would You Rather. A question offering the choice of cannibalism or starvation earns the reply, “I’d totally eat you,” leading to explicit sexual questions and expressions of desire. “Har-Tru” depicts a group of moms watching their kids fumble through tennis lessons while gossiping about a reality-television series, polyamory, and their own fantasies. In “Charity Case,” a woman pines for her music teacher, a former soap opera star who barely notices her. “There’s a Joke Here Somewhere and It’s on Me” utilizes flash fiction to encapsulate the confusing rush of adolescence. In the title story, a married couple runs a side hustle making beef jerky to stave off, among other things, their depression and midlife crises. Just as it goes for many characters here, the unexpected outcome leaves them with bitter resignation. Lippmann packs a great deal into a single turn of phrase, balancing vulnerability and humor with luminescent prose. The compression and bursts of poignancy will remind readers of Kathy Fish and Amy Hempel. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly