The Virginity of Famous Men: Stories

by Christine Sneed

Overview

The Virginity of Famous Men, award-winning story writer Christine Sneed's deeply perceptive collection on the human condition, features protagonists attempting to make peace with the choices—both personal and professional—they have so far made. In “The Prettiest Girls,” a location scout for a Hollywood film studio falls in love with a young Mexican woman who is more in love with the idea of stardom than with this older American man who takes her with him back to California. “Clear Conscience” focuses on the themes of family loyalty, divorce, motherhood, and whether “doing the right thing” is, in fact, always the right thing to do. In “Beach Vacation,” a mother realizes that her popular and coddled teenage son has become someone she has difficulty relating to, let alone loving with the same maternal fervor that once was second nature to her. The title story, “The Virginity of Famous Men,” explores family and fortune.

Long intrigued by love and loneliness, Sneed leads readers through emotional landscapes both familiar and uncharted. These probing stories are explorations of the compassionate and passionate impulses that are inherent in—and often the source of—both abiding joy and serious distress in every human life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781620406953
Publisher:	Bloomsbury USA
Publication date:	09/13/2016
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.60(d)

About the Author

Christine Sneed is also the author of the novels Paris, He Said and Little Known Facts, and the story collection Portraits of a Few of the People I've Made Cry. She received the Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction, Ploughshares' Zacharis First Book Award, the Chicago Writers Association's Book of the Year Award, and the Society of Midland Authors Award for Best Adult Fiction of 2013. Her stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and elsewhere.

Table of Contents

Beach Vacation 1

The First Wife 21

The Prettiest Girls 45

The Functionary 69

Words That Once Shocked Us 93

Five Rooms 115

Roger Weber Would Like to Stay 141

Whatshisname 161

The Couplehood Jubilee 179

Older Sister 205

Clear Conscience 231

The New, All-True CV 255

The Virginity of Famous Men 281

Acknowledgments 303

Editorial Reviews

Snared by each of the collection's tragic, comic, quirky and/or quotidian lives…the reader tears through page after page and by the end feels not only bereft but ravenous, hungry for more. While it may be a classic sign of a story well told, that yearning also arises from the sense of irresolution that permeates Sneed's fiercely meditative and unnerving short fiction…Sneed never settles many of the questions that arise throughout the collection. Paradoxically, however, this uncertainty only serves to highlight the engaging power of her writing. Our unease indicates that we've absorbed the unsettling truth saturating her stories: that placid surfaces often camouflage the rumblings of disquiet, transition, even rebellion, beneath.

The New York Times Book Review - Lauren Christensen

07/25/2016
Sneed's impressive and expansive story collection (following Portraits of a Few of the People I've Made Cry) exposes the vulnerabilities of life's many relationships: parents and children, friends, siblings, and lovers. "Beach Vacation" sets the tone for the collection, opening with the strained bond between a mother and her teenage son as she expresses her disappointment over the man he has grown to be. The tension switches from parental failure to comic satire with tales of Hollywood: "The First Wife," about the first wife of a famous movie star and his inevitable infidelity; a middle-aged producer falling for a starstruck wannabe in "The Prettiest Girls"; and, in the title story, an American who flees to Paris to escape his famous father's shadow. Each character's point of view reflects the myriad anxieties of modern life and love, the pressure to make moral choices, the failure of decisions, and the fear of what comes next. When a recently divorced woman finds work at a call center in "Words That Once Shocked Us," she befriends a colleague seeking attention outside her new marriage; she would rather have a friend than no one to share her love with. From the rich and famous to the down and out, Sneed's characters are exposed by life's twists and turns, their inner struggles laid bare as they seek connection to the people they love most . (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

"Snared by each of the collection’s tragic, comic, quirky and/or quotidian lives . . . the reader tears through page after page and by the end feels not only bereft but ravenous, hungry for more . . . Fiercely meditative and unnerving short fiction." - New York Times Book Review

"These marvelously precise and lucid stories, so rich in psychological insights, so propulsive, switch from funny to wrenching in a heartbeat. Like Ann Beattie, Amy Hempel, and Edith Pearlman, Sneed, as attuned to our buzzing-hive world as she is, writes timeless stories richly human in their empathy and wit, grace, and toughness." - starred review, Booklist

"This is an absolute gem of a collection, each perfectly formed story encompasses a world." -featured, boxed review, The Bookseller (UK)

"Sneed’s strength is her characters; we often find them in the middle of a choice. It feels refreshing. These are not the aimless, wondering, interior characters we dread in short fiction. The active nature of every one of Sneed’s people is that they want something, and we know what that something is. They desire to get away, dissolve into someone else, be saved, and ultimately not be on their own. We empathize with their desires, and root for—and sometimes fear for—the decisions they make." - Los Angeles Review of Books

"Readers will find themselves invested in these worlds and lives. Tenderly portrayed and sharply observed. A rich collection." - Kirkus

"[An] impressive and expansive story collection . . . From the rich and famous to the down and out, Sneed's characters are exposed by life's twists and turns, their inner struggles laid bare as they seek connection to the people they love most." - Publishers Weekly

"Sneed is as much heir to John O'Hara and John Cheever as to . . . Alice Munro and Mavis Gallant." - Chicago Tribune

"Sneed is excellent on the poetry of glamour, how it holds up well from a distance and dissolves on approach." - VICE

"Christine Sneed’s smart and sexy new short story collection, The Virginity of Famous Men . . . focuses less on the pursuit of sex and love than on the more complicated matter of love’s fallout . . . It’s that emotional heft that interests Sneed, and she mines it to great effect and with incredibly precise prose." - Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

"Compulsively readable. Sneed writes like a house afire, like a friend who is bursting with stories to share—and the impact is unforgettable." - Robin Black, author of LIFE DRAWING

"Only the wild imagination of Christine Sneed could have invented these funny, intimate, and exceptionally moving stories." - Peter Orner, author of LAST CAR OVER THE SAGAMORE BRIDGE

"With this brilliant new collection, Christine Sneed clinches her place among the greatest writers of her generation. These hilarious, heartbreaking, perfect stories will charm you, seduce you, change the way you see the world." - Joanna Rakoff, author of MY SALINGER YEAR

"Rich and mesmerizing. Here is love caught in the headlights. Here is a master of the short story form." - Scott Blackwood, author of SEE HOW SMALL

"Some of the most emotionally-rich writing I've read in quite some time. Sneed goes for the heart, the head, and, quite often, the funny bone." - David Abrams, author of FOBBIT

"The Virginity of Famous Men simmers with longing and desire. Sneed’s scarred protagonists—magically, incredibly—show us a potential for connection that resonates long after each story’s close." - Karen Brown, author of THE LONGINGS OF WAYWARD GIRLS

"Who we fall in love with, and why, has always fascinated Christine Sneed. In her new collection of stories, The Virginity of Famous Men, she also delves into why some of us are so drawn to fame—and how much we are willing to give up for a little bit of it." - The National Book Review

"Awakenings, sudden good luck or tragedy drive characters in these stories to bury iterations of themselves and reinvent with new pursuits, new ways of seeing, new bonds." - Newcity

"The Virginity of Famous Men is a stunning collection. The lives in these 13 stories are exquisitely imagined, utterly convincing . . . listened to carefully by Christine Sneed’s perfect ear." - Washington Independent Review of Books

"Sneed’s immersive stories contain such full worlds that they almost feel like distilled novels . . . [Her] sophisticated wit and emotional acuity . . . keep these stories vibrant." - San Francisco Chronicle

"[The Virginity of Men] imparts a lifetime of wisdom on the difficulties of love." -“2016 Fiction Shortlist," Chicago Review of Books

"Three stories in and you are mesmerised by Sneed’s confident yet intimate voice and don’t want to put the book down till you have read the lot. There is something compelling about her inside track on affairs of the heart . . . She describes loss (and thereby all life) and makes it bearable in myriad ways. An absolute treat." - Daily Mail

From the Publisher

09/01/2016
In the opening story of this collection from a Grace Paley Prize winner also noted for her novels (Paris, He Said), a mother exasperated by what she sees as her son's stubbornly inappropriate love interest suddenly slaps him. They move off "as if nothing had happened, but she knew that something irrevocable had." Throughout, Sneed repeats that sense of the irrevocable, of the consequences coming from acts large and small, inadvertent or not. A man scouting movie locations in Mexico gets entangled with a beautiful young woman who follows him back to Pasadena and displaces a more appropriate girlfriend. A functionary serving wealthy, conniving men feels trapped, yet he knows that he would be replaced by "a newer version of himself" if he quits. The first, modest writer wife of a gorgeous film star knows she will be replaced but can't stop her coming downfall. VERDICT Juicy, readable stories for the genre's fans.

Library Journal

2016-06-21
Sneed follows her recent novel (Paris, He Said, 2015, etc.) with a new, wide-ranging collection of short stories.Bad behavior is a touch point for the stories in Sneed's new collection—not scorchingly bad behavior but the potentially more interesting acts at the borders of societal decency. Often, the questionable quality of her characters' choices is something that comes to light as the story progresses, either to the characters themselves or to a close observer. "Beach Vacation" tracks a mother as she recognizes, with despair, the entitled attitude of her teenage son. "Couplehood Jubilee" centers on a young woman whose loved ones are warmly indulgent of her entitled ideas. Protagonists in "Clear Conscience" and "Words that Once Shocked Us" are possibly complicit witnesses to infidelity. Both also share a sense of having reached middle age only to find themselves emotionally stunted by recent minor disasters, a theme that is present in much of the collection. The vulnerable girls in "Five Rooms" and "Older Sister" are in need of guidance and care that they find hard to attain. Many of the stories hint at the ridiculous or otherworldly; the title character from "Roger Weber Would Like to Stay" is in fact a ghost, but everything else in the story is perfectly mundane. "The First Wife," "The Prettiest Girls," and "The Virginity of Famous Men" are each narrated by a Hollywood-adjacent character and hint at an entire culture with a different moral code, the title story revisiting the family at the heart of Sneed's first novel, Little Known Facts (2013). A melancholy floats through the collection like Roger Weber through walls. Though most stories stop short of promising hope, readers will find themselves invested in these worlds and lives. Tenderly portrayed and sharply observed. A rich collection.

Kirkus Reviews

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