Mending: New and Selected Stories, Sallie Bingham
In Mending, Sallie Bingham follows the often brutal course of yearning and its disappointments with an emotional acuity both unflinching and vigilant. From the first assertions and compromises of sexuality-those accommodations that tug and chafe-to the constrictions of adulthood and, finally, the fixed contours of a maturity where need has been winnowed down, but so has our ability to accommodate, Bingham's stories radiate with an honesty that is as insistent as it is compassionate. These stories, spanning a career of 50 years and ranging from the fecund Kentucky of her youth to the starker landscapes of New Mexico, have been called "sharp, elegant narratives" by Entertainment Weekly and "luminous" by Publishers Weekly. Taken together, they offer a vision of our inexhaustible hope that there might be a fitting home for the heart.
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Additional Info
Sallie Bingham published her first novel with Houghton Mifflin in 1961. Since then she has published four collections of short stories, four novels, and a memoir. She was Book Editor for The Courier-Journal in Louisville and has been a director of the National Book Critics Circle. She is the founder of The Kentucky Foundation for Women.
PRAISE FOR SALLIE BINGHAM:
“Sallie Bingham binds her collection together with sheer talent. The title novella is absolutely first-rate a skillfully suggestive amalgam of Katherine Mansfield and Eudora Welty. This same unblinking gaze is hard at work on the essential weakness and dependence of men (‘The Banks of the Ohio’ and ‘The Ice Party’), the illusion of freedom that comes with divorce ("Bare Bones"), and the desperate terror of adolescent love (‘Winter Term’).”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Sallie Bingham’s characters scrutinize their relationships with children, lovers, and their own treacherous souls…. Nearly every one of these flinty stories is a tiny masterpiece.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“Hardened but not compromised by adult life, these luminous stories…feature narrators who find mature, often solitary forms of reckoning, and even happiness….There is not a false note in Bingham’s striking collection.”
—Starred Review, Publishers Weekly
“These engaging tales span landscape, gender, and age, and readers will treasure Bingham’s strikingly perceptive composition and refined, clever flashes of detail and clarity.”
—Booklist