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Winner of the 1997 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction
Recipient of the 1999 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award for Fiction
"In A Gram of Mars, Hagenston offers us tales of the heart at home, capturing the fractured experiences of family and the often desperate need for connection. Set on the author’s home turf of Maryland, where she grew up, and in Arizona, where she attended graduate school, Hagenston’s stories bravely document the ways in which we fail each other and ourselves. . . . One is both comforted and challenged by the familiarity of the characters and the shared history that is life in the late 20th century. Hers is a new and necessary voice in American fiction. —from the Foreword by A.M. Homes"
In her debut collection of short stories, Becky Hagenston portrays the modern family as one that refuses to be fashionably dysfunctional. In the hyphenated, divorced, and step-parented context of the late twentieth century, Hagenston reminds us, it is the minister and his wife in a small town in Maryland who are unconventional. These stories, conveyed with spirited, conversational prose, prove that the meaning of family prevails.
In 'Holding the Fort,' a husband's infidelity dissolves his marriage but not the couple's emotional ties. And in "A Gram of Mars," an adult daughter responds to her divorced father’s anguish upon learning of his ex-wife's remarriage, and the whole fractured family reconvenes for an evening: "Beside me, my father is breathing slow and regular as a child, and I wonder suddenly if he's fallen asleep. But his eyes are open, fixed on the road. For a moment, I believe I know what he's thinking—he has seen the woman he loves, and his daughter is beside him, and for now everything is just as simple as that. . . . When he sighs, I lean back in my seat and try to think of nothing. The sky vaults over us and silence settles down, like a pact we've made together, like a precious, immeasurable weight."
Hagenston manages, with subtle emotional logic, to turn the joke of the dysfunctional family on its head. As one character says, “If something can begin millions of years ago on Mars and somehow, miraculously, find its way to my father—then why not something simpler, like happiness, which happens every day right here on earth?”
Becky Hagenston grew up in Maryland and received her MFA from the University of Arizona. Her stories have appeared in numerous journals, including TriQuarterly, Shenandoah, The Crescent Review, Antietam Review, Folio, Press, Witness, and Carolina Quarterly. She has received an O. Henry Award and a Bread Loaf Scholarship, and currently resides in Tucson, Arizona.
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