Wife with Knife

by Molly Giles

Overview

Winner of the Pushcart Prize and the Leapfrog Global Fiction Prize

"This collection is her best ever." AMY TAN
Wife with Knife is a collection of quick and quirky short stories, that are an utter delight and winner of the Leapfrog Global Fiction Prize 2020

"Molly Giles’ stories have always been among my favorites since I first read her work thirty-seven years ago. This collection is her best ever. What an irreverent, original voice! I found myself gasping in shock and laughter, feeling at the end of each tale that I had garnered strange wisdom on the human heart and its unerring sense for finding trouble."—Amy Tan, author of The Joy Luck Club

The speakers in Molly Giles’s Wife With Knife offer their truths with surprising starkness: “[T]he actual heart looks more like a tongue than a valentine” states the grief-flayed aunt of “Agate Beach,” while the careless driver of “Accident” thinks “If I rear-ended anyone in California, I might be sued or shot but I would not be prayed upon.” Many of the stories are not traditional narratives but glimpses of the trouble or healing that lies ahead: teens refusing to heed traffic, lovers staring down death and betrayal and closure. Like a street magician’s trick, Wife With Knife holds out each everyday tragedy or quiet triumph only to replace it seamlessly with another.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781948585293
Publisher:	Leapfrog Press
Publication date:	11/16/2021
Pages:	208
Sales rank:	690,918
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

MOLLY GILES is the award-winning author of six story collections and one novel. Most recently Wife With Knife won a PUSHCART PRIZE for the story "Bad Dog." Rough Translations won The Flannery O’Connor Prize, the Boston Globe Award, and The Bay Area Book Reviewers’ Award; Creek Walk won The Small Press Best Fiction Award, the California Commonwealth Silver Medal for Fiction, and was a New York Times Notable Book; Bothered won the Split Oak Press Flash Fiction Award; and All The Wrong Places won the Spokane Prize for Fiction. Her work has also earned The O. Henry Award and the Pushcart Prize, and she has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Marin Arts Council, and the Arkansas Arts Council. 

Editorial Reviews

This book reminds me of Alice Munro. Like Munro’s stories, the reader experiences an immediate immersion into the story and characters’ lives, situations, attitude, and problems. This partially comes about through masterful first lines. No easing into the story. It’s a dive without having gotten wet first… and without any gasping confusion."—Cris Mazza, author of Yet to Come

"With insightful prose and a sharp sense of humor, Molly Giles once again reminds us why she is one of the best short story writers writing today. Whether it is the tale of the beleaguered artist’s wife angered by being overlooked or the quick sketch of two teenage girls offering a silent protest in middle of a busy road, Giles’ fantastic use of voice will have you clearly recognizing these characters and their frustrations. Smart and original, these stories capture the wild interior lives of people on the verge."—Luisa Smith, Buying Director, Book Passage Bookstore

From the Publisher