Vendor
	Fletcher Agency Yona Levin
Original language
English

YOU HAVE A FRIEND IN 10A: Stories

Maggie Shipstead

From New York Times best-selling and Booker Prize shortlisted author Maggie Shipstead, a piercing, irresistible first collection of short stories exquisite in their craft and audacious in their range

A love triangle plays out over decades on a Montana dude ranch. A hurdler and a gymnast spend a single night together in the Olympic village. Mistakes and mysteries weave an intangible web around an old man’s deathbed in Paris, connecting disparate destinies. On the slopes of an unfinished ski resort, a young woman searches for her vanished lover. A couple’s Romanian honeymoon goes ominously awry, and, in the mesmerizing title story, a former child actress breaks with her life in a Hollywood cult.

In these and other stories, knockout after knockout, Shipstead delivers another “extraordinary” (New York Times) work of fiction and seals her reputation as a writer of “breathtaking range and skill” (Kirkus Reviews). Rich in imagination and dazzling in its shapeshifting style, You Have a Friend in 10A excavates the complexities of love, sex, and life in ways unsparing and hilarious, sharp-eyed and tender.

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Book Published 2022-05-17 by Knopf

Comments

The 10 stories in this daring, wide-ranging debut collection from Shipstead (after the novel Great Circle) resonate as they leap across time and space. “The Cowboy Tango,” set at a Montana dude ranch, cruises through several decades as the complicated relationship between the ranch’s owner and a woman who works for him remains uncomfortably static, then changes radically upon the arrival of the owner’s nephew. “Lambs,” on one level a casual piece about the interactions of those at an artist’s colony in Ireland, is haunted by an eerie foreshadowing as each character is introduced with parenthetical summaries of their birth and death dates, which makes its ending both surprising and believable. The masterwork is the deeply unsettling “La Moretta.” Interspersed with segments from an enigmatic inquisition, it documents a honeymoon excursion gone horribly wrong. Here and throughout, Shipstead demonstrates a remarkable ability to interlace the events of ordinary life with a mythological sense of preordained destruction. Both formally inventive and emotionally complex, this pays off with dividends.

Acclaimed author Shipstead (Great Circle, 2021) turns her considerable talent to the short story, offering readers this sweeping collection crafted over the course of a decade. With some stories formally workshopped and others written in isolation, the resulting collection is an effortlessly transporting and piercing journey. Stories focus on those innate, immutable, and deeply rooted human characteristics within us all that we perhaps wish were a bit more malleable. An ego- driven author looks at the success of his peers as a refutation of his own talent; a thrice-married dad drags his bohemian daughters to clean out his father’s home; after a decade of unrequited love, a rancher resolves a rash decision: these focused yet complex characters and others populate You Have a Friend in 10A. While there’s no shortage of compelling characters and penetrating insights, the book’s title story is one of its strongest, as an amenable actress is charmed into, then out of, an isolating pseudoscience-based religion (thinly veiled Scientology). Reaching across decades and set in a diverse array of locations both domestic and exotic, Shipstead’s latest will find a home on bookshelves next to the work of Andre Dubus III, Jane Smiley, and Richard Russo.

In this follow-up to her Booker short-listed Great Circle, Shipstead displays luminous, exacting language as she demonstrates her flair for creating distinctive characters who deal more or less successfully with what life has handed them. A teenage girl fleeing an ugly home situation ends up as a horse wrangler, appreciating the man who hires her though she cannot return his love. A newbie novelist is only beginning to realize what a pretentious jerk he was in graduate school. In the standout “Souterrain” (“subterranean” in French), feckless Iris inherits a house in Paris from her blind grandfather, Pierre, and a story unfolds of a family tragedy during World War II; Pierre’s guilt over his inadvertent role in events, despite his youth; the painfully suppressed past of his housekeeper, Madame Harmou; and the tragic misunderstanding that dooms her son. Here as elsewhere, the characters’ lives are shaped by unexpected or hidden events, large and small, and in the end Pierre’s memories “will join the dark matter that surrounds the living: the memories of the dead, undetectable but still exerting force.” VERDICT Essential for fiction lovers.

Running the gamut between parodic faux-autofiction and historical fiction narrated by a bevy of marooned, increasingly dissolute Frenchwomen, the stories here are almost studiously varied.
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“It’s a rare writer who can create a world as convincingly over a few pages as in a 600-page novel; Shipstead’s fluency in both forms is testament to the skill she modestly casts as a work in progress”