'Sestanovich's elegant prose takes seriously the quiet unrest that can ravage a life' - Raven Leilani, author of Luster
A Best Book of the Summer in The Wall Street Journal, Entertainment Weekly,Vogue, Esquire and Refinery29
A university student is flying home to visit her family when she strikes up an odd, ephemeral friendship with the couple next to her on the plane. A mother prepares for her son's wedding, her own life unravelling as his comes together. A long-lost stepbrother's visit prompts a family's reckoning with its old taboos.
In these eleven powerful stories, thrilling desire and melancholic yearning animate women's lives - from the brink of adulthood, to the labyrinthine path between twenty and thirty, to middle age, when certain possibilities quietly lapse. Tender, lucid and piercingly funny, Objects of Desire is a collection pulsing with subtle drama, rich with unforgettable scenes, and alive with moments of recognition, each more startling than the last - a spellbinding debut that announces a major talent.
'A debut story collection of the rarest kind . . . you wish that every single entry could be an entire novel.' - Entertainment Weekly
Clare Sestanovich named one of The National Book Foundation's '5 under 35'.
Title: Objects of Desire
Author: Sestanovich, Clare
ISBN: 9781529053586
Binding:
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Publication Date: 2022-07-21
Number of Pages: 224
Weight: 0.1600 kg
Sestanovich's elegant prose takes seriously the quiet unrest that can ravage a life, and makes room for the pleasure and discovery that can be found in that ruin -- Raven Leilani, author of Luster
Sublimely polished . . . collectively probe the gap between how we're seen and how we might long to appear. -- Hephzibah Anderson * Observer *
Sestanovich's steady hand and bone-clean prose recall such foremothers as Joan Didion, Zadie Smith, and Jhumpa Lahiri -- Elinor Hitt * The Paris Review *
Sestanovich is an extraordinary noticer. Carefully, sparely, she parses layers of feeling and attitude; of the tiny ways we admit or refuse love; of incremental, almost invisible, losses of self * Guardian *
Bold and beguiling -- Chloe Aridjis, author of Book of Clouds
The summer's most buzzed about book * Sunday Times *
As far as writing pedigrees go, it doesn't get much more impressive than The New Yorker and The Paris Review . . . A smart, incisive look at the complexities of being a woman right now * Stylist *
Smart and accomplished . . . Sestanovich's prose is poised and understated, sensorily precise . . . her gift is to make ordinary moments shine brightly * The New York Times Book Review *
Astonishing - one of the best story collections I've read in a long time . . . I feel like I've found a new favorite writer - Clare Sestanovich is stylish and skilled, an astute chronicler of contemporary life -- Brandon Taylor, Booker-shortlisted author of Real Life
Nuanced, beautifully shaped . . . In Sestanovich's hands, the mundane feels surprising-mesmerizing, even * Refinery29 *
Clare Sestanovich's stories compelled me like gravity, and offered sharp, surprising, singular bursts of grace -- Leslie Jamison, author of The Recovering and The Empathy Exams
Extraordinary * Esquire *
Clare Sestanovich is a gifted observer and writes a sentence sharp enough to cut yourself on . . . A magnificent debut -- Nathan Englander, author of Dinner at the Center of the Earth
A debut story collection of the rarest kind: One in which you wish that every single entry could be an entire novel. * Entertainment Weekly *
Objects of Desire is a marvel . . . I loved this book -- Miranda Popkey, author of Topics of Conversation
Luminous . . . Sestanovich writes with a kind of bracing cold-plunge clarity. Objects of Desire taps into the peculiar, primal struggle of becoming who you are, and all the stories you have to tell yourself to get there. -- Leah Greenblatt * Entertainment Weekly *
A fun read [that] reminds us that we're all human -- Kaia Gerber, quoted in The Wall Street Journal
Sestanovich is a skilled craftswoman, each sentence a carefully positioned tile in a mosaic * Vulture *
A mesmerizing, exquisite debut -- Dana Spiotta, author of Innocents and Others
[Sestanovich's] characters always seem poised at the brink of some great, terrifying, wondrous unraveling * Electric Literature *
Sestanovich's intelligent debut collection demonstrates a gift for pithy detail that encapsulates the whole of a character's personality or era of lived experience * Publishers Weekly *
Exquisitely observed, and sure to stay with you long after you've finished * Bustle *
Wry and knowing and deeply funny -- Mira Sethi, author of Are You Enjoying?
Sestanovich's writing is clever and rich with layers, just like her characters. And the textures of her sentences are as nuanced as desire itself * Fiction Writers' Review *
Sestanovich expertly places you in the mind of different women, young and old, rich and poor, single and in relationships. The stolen glimpses into the complex minds of her characters will leave you unable to resist writing the rest of their story in your head * Reaction *
These stories are restrained, nearly aloof, despite the fact that the characters are constantly and messily butting up against the futility of their desires * Kirkus *
