Catherine Lacey

"In the twelve stories collected in Certain American States, Catherine Lacey, the award-winning author of the acclaimed novels Nobody Is Ever Missing and The Answers, picks apart the minutiae of the human condition with the skill of a surgeon, giving life to a collection of ordinary people seeking -- and failing to find -- the extraordinary in their lives. The characters in Certain American States are continually coming to terms with their place in...

"A human-like creature emerges in a small town and sends the citizens into a frenzy"-- In a small unnamed town in the American South, a church congregation arrives to a service and finds a figure asleep on a pew. The person is genderless, racially ambiguous, and refuses to speak. One family takes the strange visitor in and nicknames them Pew. As the town spends the week preparing for a mysterious Forgiveness Festival, Pew is shuttled from one household...

"The story of a young woman who takes a one-way flight to New Zealand, abruptly leaving her stable but unfulfilling life in Manhattan, hurtling herself into the unknown, testing fate by hitchhiking, tacitly being swept into the lives of strangers and sleeping in fields, forests or public parks"--

"A pampered playboy acquires an elegant townhouse complete with a dedicated man servant. But when the young man's fiancè becomes suspicious of the servant's intentions, he and his 'sister' thrust the household into a sinister game where seduction is corruption and power becomes the most shocking desire of all"--Container.