Man and Wife

by Katie Chase

Overview

This bracing, intelligent debut tackles the strangeness of growing up, the joys and difficulties of breaking away from family, and our sometime absurd or downright dangerous rites of passage. The girls and women in these stories come up against the rules and roles that give shape to their worlds. As marriages are arranged over tea, blood feuds simmer beneath football games , and the rules of  a city burn, they struggle between holding onto their families and seeking out new ways to live and love. These stories ask, as our hands slip from the long line of tradition and we become refugees from home, what, if anything, is lost. And how is that what we thought we’d let go keeps finding its way back?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780989275989
Publisher:	Deep Vellum Publishing
Publication date:	05/10/2016
Pages:	220
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.70(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Katie Chase's short fiction has appeared in the Missouri Review, Five Chapters, the Literary Review, Narrative, Prairie Schooner, ZYZZYVA, Mississippi Review, and the Best American Short Stories and Pushcart Prize anthologies. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she is the recipient of a Teaching-Writing Fellowship, a Provost's Postgraduate Writing Fellowship, and a Michener- Copernicus Award. She has also been a fellow of the MacDowell Colony and the Center for Steinbeck Studies at San José State University. Born and raised outside Detroit, Michigan, she lives currently in Portland, Oregon.

Editorial Reviews

Katie Chase's debut is full of fun-house mirror examinations of female adolescence, marriage rites and suburban routine…There's a healthy dose of Margaret Atwood's dystopian feminism throughout, and Ms. Chase has an imagination worth watching.

The New York Times - John Williams

03/21/2016
Chase’s eight stories have conventional, relaxed surfaces, but simmer with subversive twists. “The Hut” begins, “My mother thought the best way to teach me to be a woman was to teach me to be alone.” What follows is the main character’s forced confinement in a cabin, depicted with palpable urgency. “Refugees” seems set near the present, but centers on victims of the housing bubble who live in a camp straight out of Steinbeck. Once the reader is attuned to Chase’s unique brand of mischief, the opening line of the title story rightly sets off alarm bells: “They say every girl remembers that special day when everything starts to change.” Here, nine-year-old Mary Ellen is excitedly informed by her father that he has secured her marriage to family friend Mr. Middleton, “that nice man with the moustache.” Throughout these stories, an unusual lens is used on modern American life, giving them an edge of social commentary, and the collection as a whole an appealing unity. But Chase’s high concepts occasionally overwhelm her storytelling, making stretches of prose one-dimensional. Still, this is a consistently provocative debut collection. (May)

Publishers Weekly

"Katie Chase's stories have a rhythm, a form, and a mesmerism all their own."—Kevin Brockmeier, author of The Brief History of the Dead "Toggling between the comic and the horrific, these brilliant stories rearrange the familiar into something more nuanced, fraught, and mysterious."—Edan Lepucki, author of California "With sharp, confident consideration of what it takes to survive in the world as a woman, Man and Wife introduces an important new literary voice."—Danielle Evans, author of Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self "Katie Chase's narrators sound like the girl-next-door…if you lived next door to a parallel universe."—Peter Ho Davies, author of The Welsh Girl "Captivating, haunting, and eerily smart. Every story in this collection gave me chills. Katie Chase is one of a kind."—Jennifer DuBois, author of Cartwheel "An imagination worth watching."—The New York Times

From the Publisher