Wife With Knife
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Published by: Leapfrog Press
Release Date: November 16, 2021
ISBN13: 978-1911673187
Overview
Containing thirty-four new and selected stories, Wife with Knife was the winner of the Leapfrog Global Fiction Prize.
The speakers in Molly Giles’s Wife With Knife offer their truths with surprising starkness: “[T]he actual heart looks more like a tongue than a valentine” states the grief-flayed aunt of “Agate Beach,” while the careless driver of “Accident” thinks “If I rear-ended anyone in California, I might be sued or shot but I would not be prayed upon.” Many of the stories are not traditional narratives but glimpses of the trouble or healing that lies ahead: teens refusing to heed traffic, lovers staring down death and betrayal and closure. Like a street magician’s trick, Wife With Knife holds out each everyday tragedy or quiet triumph only to replace it seamlessly with another.
Praise
“This collection is Molly Giles’s best ever. What an irreverent original voice! I found myself gasping in shock and laughter, feeling at the end of each tale that I had garnered strange wisdom on the human heart and its unerring senses for finding trouble.”
- Amy Tan
“Like Alice Munro’s stories, the reader experiences an immediate immersion into the story and characters’ lives, situations, attitudes, and problems. This partially comes about through masterful first lines. No easing into the story.
It’s a dive.”
– Cris Mazza
Excerpt
“Rafe was a drunk when I married him but he wasn’t famous; fame came later, after his third one-man show. Suddenly everyone loved him. The students of course—he’d been at the Academy for years, so I was used to little girls phoning and fawning—but after The Times review it was society women and gallery owners and rock stars; my best friend Pamela was in there too, the snake, and I was sick of it.”
