Pleasure Palace: New and Selected Stories

by Marian Thurm

Overview

At the age of 25, Marian Thurm began publishing short stories in The New Yorker, and her work has been compared to the short fiction of Lorrie Moore, Ann Beattie, and Amy Bloom. Known for her uncanny sense of the absurd along with her empathy for her characters, Thurm’s acclaimed work has been chosen for The Best American Short Stories and numerous other anthologies. This volume, selected from her four short story collections—with stories written over a span of 42 years—shows Thurm’s remarkable craft, never failing to reveal both her emotional acuity and her pitch-dark humor.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781953002044
Publisher:	Delphinium
Publication date:	05/25/2021
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Marian Thurm is the author of seven other novels and five short story collections, including Today Is Not Your Day, a New York Times Editors’ Choice. Her novel The Clairvoyant was a New York Times Notable Book. Her short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic,  Michigan Quarterly Review, Narrative Magazine, The Southampton Review, and many other magazines, and have been included in The Best American Short Stories, and numerous other anthologies. Her books have been translated into Japanese, Swedish, Dutch, German, and Italian. She has taught creative writing at Yale Universityand Barnard College, in the MFA programs at Columbia Universityand Brooklyn College, at the Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence, and at the Yale Writers’ Workshop.

Editorial Reviews

[An] unsparing, ironic sensibility and killer eye for detail…Though her view of things is almost unremittingly dark, Thurm is always ready with a wisecrack to take the edge off."

From the Publisher

An exceptional collection of stories… vivid and startling… Thurm embraces the ironies and the absurdities of the ordinary world and transforms them into a series of small epiphanies.

Newsday

Praise for These Things Happen: “What distinguishes these stories… is Ms. Thurm's ability to extrapolate whole lives from a few lines of dialogue, a handful of carefully selected observations. In many respects, the world she depicts is an absurdly contemporary one… and yet Ms. Thurm writes with such precision, such attention to psychological detail that she makes this world completely recognizable and true. More importantly, she is always careful to situate her characters within a dense matrix of relationships… we come to see her characters in the round, like beautifully shaped sculptures, rather than as simple portraits in a frame."

New York Times

Marian Thurm is either a movingly compassionate observer of human foibles or a charmingly ruthless one. The best stories in her fourth collection suggest that she is both… [with] her keen gift for portraying the slippery, comical psychology of people who have a tough time believing this is how their lives have gotten kicked out from under them. She makes it all look effortless, and that’s no easy task.

New York Times Book Review

With its concise and insightful prose and pitch-perfect dialogue, this is a collection to savor.

starred review Booklist

Careful, assured, exact, she is a delight to read. She has a fine ear for the way people talk, a clear head and a heart that is almost broken—‘almost’ because there’s humor and wit and a glimmer of hope.

Chicago Tribune

Careful, assured, exact, she is a delight to read. She has a fine ear for the way people talk, a clear head and a heart that is almost broken—‘almost’ because there’s humor and wit and a glimmer of hope.

Chicago Tribune