Goodnight, Beautiful Women: a powerful collection of short stories about the women of a small town in Maine

(Paperback, Main)

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Description

Anna Noyes has produced a powerful, mesmerizing debut collection of loosely interconnected short stories. Assured and atmospheric and imbued with the luminous beauty of the Maine coastline, these stories are bold, unflinching and utterly compelling. Ordinary lives are held under the microscope, making them vivid, extraordinary - steeped with promise yet mired by threat, driven mad with longing, muted by heartache and loss, trapped in the evanescence of memory. With breathtaking control and a rhythmic, lucid prose that is distinctly her own, Goodnight Beautiful Women marks Anna Noyes as an exhilarating new talent.

Reviews

Noyes' achievement here is nothing less than a high-wire act: precise, fearless, breathtaking. She casts an unwavering gaze on the nature of frailty and desire, offering up gem after gem in this sensuous and startling debut. -- Ta Obreht
Seductive, smart, and erotic, Anna Noyes' stories evoke with beautiful clarity love and sexual awakening. She is a most exciting discovery. -- Lily King

A mesmerizing collection of stories by one of America's most exciting young writers... Tender yet unsentimental, unflinchingly bold but full of beauty, Anna Noyes' debut lingers in the mind well beyond its final paragraph. A book to fall in love with.

-- Jonathan Lee, author of Joy and Who is Mr Satoshi
Anna Noyes has the gift... It is a joy - and the sweetest kind of heartache - to watch her making her swift way story by story to their hearts. -- Kevin Brockmeier, author of The Illumination and The Brief History of the Dead

This is an extraordinary book of stories... [They] are energetic, often mysterious, and beautifully written, and they will stay in your memory long after you finish the book.

-- Charles Baxter, author of The Feast of Love

These stories shine with prismatic, perfectly rendered settings, but more brilliant still is the delicacy with which Noyes unspools the inner lives of her characters... This feels like no debut at all, but a voice fully formed.

-- Casey Walker, author of Last Days in Shanghai
With exceptional delicacy and grace, Noyes cracks opens the most ordinary moments and offers us their painful core. Noyes's prose is precise, skillful, and full of raw emotion. It's some of the most elegant writing I've come across recently. -- Dina Nayeri, author of A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea
Assured and atmospheric, tender and melancholy, these stories of women adrift linger in the mind like music. I love them. -- Karen Thompson Walker
[Noyes' characters] do not shy from their imperfections as they search for those fleeting, ambiguous moments of resolution. * Booklist *
Women combat the bleak Maine wilderness and more insidious dangers within their own homes in a debut as rich and quiet as a walk in the dark. * Huffington Post *
[Noyes'] praise is well-deserved; she writes poignantly about women of all ages and economic backgrounds coming together and drifting apart in New England. The stories are loosely connected, demonstrating how the rippling effects of one event, of one lie, can reach farther than imaginable. * Huffington Post *
If the fiction of Stephen King and Alice Munro had a literary love child, it might look like this: luminous domestic moments married to a pervasive sense of threat. * Washington Post *
Anna Noyes's superb debut collection [is made up of] haunting, beautifully restrained stories * LitHub *
The stories... consistently sparkle with expressive detail * New York Times Book Review *
Anna Noyes is as sensuous as she is grounded. The beauty of her language, with its rhythmic pulls and earthy descriptions are captivating... a young and gifted writer. * Travel + Leisure *
Her prose is beautifully evocative * Grazia *
Anna Noyes is basically the living embodiment of Hannah Hovarth's ambitions in Girls. Straight out of Iowa Writers' Workshop, she's written for various literary publications before turning in a book of short stories on the sensual and often strained lives of women along the beautiful Maine coast. She will suck you in. * Grazia *

Author Bio

Anna Noyes is a recent graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her fiction has appeared in VICE, A Public Space, and Guernica, amongst others. She has received the Aspen Words Emerging Writer Fellowship and the James Merrill House Fellowship. Goodnight, Beautiful Women received the 2013 Henfield Prize for Fiction.