Games and Rituals

(Hardback)

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Superb
THE TIMES

Joyous
THE OBSERVER

The beloved author of Early Morning Riser brings us eleven glittering stories of love friendships formed at the airport bar, ex-husbands with benefits, mothers of suspiciously sweet teenagers, ill-advised trysts in all its forms, both ridiculous and sublime.
The games and rituals performed by Katherine Heinys characters range from mischievous to tender. In Bridesmaid, Revisited, Marilee, suffering from a laundry and life crisis, wears a massive bridesmaids dress to work. In Twist and Shout, Erickas elderly father mistakes his four-thousand-dollar hearing aid for a cashew and eats it. In Turn Back, Turn Back, a bedtime story coupled with a receipt for a Starbucks babyccino reveal a struggling actors deception. And in 561, Charlene pays the true price of infidelity and is forced to help her husbands ex-wife move out of the family home.

From one of our most celebrated writers, our bard of waking up in the wrong bed, wearing the wrong shoes, late for the wrong job, but loved by the right people, Katherine Heiny has delivered a work of glorious humour and immense kindness.

Reviews

Praise for Games and Rituals

Heiny has the comic writers knack of taking a characters idiosyncrasies () and making them joyfully relatable. (And she can say more in a pithy parenthesis than many writers manage in a page.) She has a genius for spinning universality out of the absurdly specific
THE GUARDIAN

Superb as near perfection as, say, Donald Trump is far from it Heiny is habitually congratulated for writing feelgood stories, but if these pointed, satirical, emotionally ruthless takes on humanity merely made me feel good, I wouldnt value them half as much.
THE TIMES

For any reader yet to encounter Katherine Heiny, this sparky new story collection provides a joyous introductionThe deadpan delivery, the bittersweet wisdom, the sublime farce its all here.
THE OBSERVER

Anyone who has read any of Heinys previous work will know she has a knack for capturing all the vicissitudes of love in a way that few other writers can. Games and Rituals is no different, bringing the minutiae of our everyday interactions to life with humour and clarity.
iNEWS

Short stories sometimes leave you wanting more but each one in this collection is as satisfying as any novel All human life is here and Heiny exposes its complexity with wit and poignancy
GOOD HOUSEKEEPING

Im a devoted fan of Katherine Heiny. I cant think of another writer who manages to gets so under the skin of her charactersThese might be short stories but each one contains multitudes.
RED MAGAZINE

Games and Rituals, full of relatably weird characters discovering their self-deceptions, proves her to be the most pleasurable architect of the short story form writing todayHer radar for peoples eccentricities is exquisite
INDEPENDENT

Witty, astute and delightfully accessible
SUNDAY TIMES

Author Bio

Katherine Heiny's fiction has been published in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Narrative,Glimmer Train, and many other places. She lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband and children. This is her first book.