Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Marie Arendt
Categories
Biography, Literature & Literary studies

MID-AIR

Victoria Shorr

Two Novellas

The author's remarkable gift for depicting the inner lives of complex characters shines in two powerful explorations of family, ambition, class, and status.

Fate explored in the fall and rise of two twentieth-century American families. In "Great Uncle Edward," a family gathers for dinner. At 93, Great Uncle Edward commands the table in his three-piece suit; Cousin Russell attended both Harvard and Yale but is now reduced to selling off the family books; sisters Betty and Molly are caught between ghosts of a storied past and creeping destitution. These lives are signposts along the downward spiral of an old aristocracy. "Cleveland Auto Wrecking" introduces Sam White, an immigrant from somewhere in eastern Europe. He cannot read, but has a gift for math and an instinct for the value of junk. We follow his clan through the Depression to the postwar boom in the West, where their fortunes soar, creating new tests of loyalty. Victoria Shorr is a writer and political activist. She is the author of three works of fiction, including the acclaimed historical novel The Plum Trees. She lives in New York and Santa Barbara, California.

Available products
Book Published 2022-05-17 by W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. - New York (USA)

Comments

Shorr's prose is fluid and supple... her insights are so keen, and her storytelling so elegant and natural... this book is a quiet accomplishment.

Shorr proves herself a literary mimic of the first order with these two pitch-perfect stories...[She] cleverly juxtaposes how one aspect of American society falls as another rises, and both novellas have a novellike density of detail and depth of characterization. Together, they offer rich rewards.

Victoria Shorr is a conjurer of the highest order, artfully creating apposite tales of family ruin and family success in her wry, insightful, and elegant prose.

The two novellas in Victoria Shorr's book Mid-Air are intimate portraits of inclusion and exclusion, as well as the dangers implicit in nostalgia. Rich with an acerbic skepticism and abetted by the unexpected detail that renders something humorous, Shorr writes with a tolerance of ambiguity that is provocative as well as enlightening.

In style and substance, Shorr summons the works of Anne Tyler as she rejoices in her characters' day-to-day experiences, dropping pearls of insight into crystalline vignettes.