The Kindness of Terrible People and Other Stories - Paperback

Stephanie Dupal's debut collection of fifteen stories evokes in startling, lyrical prose the cruelties, misguided kindnesses, and surprises that accompany ageing and mortality in the lives of girls and women. Demonstrating a remarkable range of intimate dilemmas set in varied landscapes, these stories affirm the validity of characters' choices and the courage--and rage--of their convictions.

In "To Lie Engulfed in the Waves of the Sea," a renowned cellist lies to be hired at a performing arts school; in "The Ethics of Keeping Company with Strangers," a strong-willed teenager and her father are stranded in a Utah desert; in "A Baby of the Ganges," a grieving couple attempts to reconcile on a trip to Kolkata; in "Godfrey Green," an art restorer, painting in the shadow of her elusive mentor, abandons her ambitions; and, in the emblematic final story "Boys and Girls Swimming Like Dolphins," a Marine veteran and her husband fixate on the gender of their future child as they consider fertility treatments.

Among other characters inhabiting these pages are an inebriated mother who fears detachment from her son; a retired professor who lures her niece's boyfriend into devastating, flirtatious conversation in the title story; a lonely widow who hunts an imposing raccoon; and a girl with a rare condition who becomes an unlikely heroine in Napoleonic France.

Richly imagined, The Kindness of Terrible People and Other Stories heralds a bold new voice in North American letters.