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Speed Dreaming
Nicole Haroutunian
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Description for Speed Dreaming
Paperback. Num Pages: 154 pages. BIC Classification: FA. Dimension: 141 x 210 x 13. Weight in Grams: 194.
From a captivating new author come twelve piercing stories, in which young women negotiate friendship and marriage, art and commerce, and the possibility their lives might not work out as planned. After the house of the young couple in “A Cane, an Anchor” goes up in flames, they’re unsure of what they lost in the fire and what they’d lost long before it. “The Living” asks, how would you arrange your life if you had only six months left? In “Youse,” two teenage girls are the targets of an attempted kidnapping. A trio of linked stories—including the title track—follows Meg ... Read moreand Dax, a curator and a butcher who married impulsively, from their eerie honeymoon in rural Wales through Meg’s identity crisis when the museum where she works is destroyed, to early parenthood, when a coyote’s spectral presence at their child’s birthday party in a Brooklyn park suggests deeper threats.
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Product Details
Publisher
Amazon Publishing United States
Place of Publication
Seattle, United States
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 4 to 8 working days
About Nicole Haroutunian
Originally from New Jersey, Nicole Haroutunian received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. Her short story “Youse” was the winner of the Center for Fiction’s 2013 short story contest. She is coeditor of the digital arts journal Underwater New York, works as a museum educator, and lives with her husband in Woodside, Queens.
Reviews for Speed Dreaming
“A bowler hat, a volleyball net, a pig tattoo: Nicole Haroutunian’s stories all have unexpected details that attract the eye and alert the mind. Those details glitter on the surface while something else entirely goes on underneath: dark tides of life, death, illness, and love, and people who are carried away by them during the course of otherwise normal lives.” ... Read more—Ben Greenman, author of The Slippage and Mo Meta Blues “Nicole Haroutunian is a master of excavating what is ominous and therefore worthy of examination in our everyday lives—sleepover games, damaged bodies, dying cities, Brooklyn parrots, and the prosaic catastrophes of love. I loved reading these perfectly formed stories about thoughtful urbanites and their search for meaning in the mundane.” —Amy Shearn, author of The Mermaid of Brooklyn and How Far Is The Ocean from Here “Haroutunian’s breezy prose, and her characters’ humor and relatability—even when dealing with a recently-paralyzed boyfriend, a rocky new marriage, or a father’s recent death—makes reading this captivating collection a true joy.” —Bustle, Best Books of March “Speed Dreaming is a book spilling over with talent. How enticing and accurately drawn these stories are, with their bright touches and ominous edges, their smart young characters blocked by what they can’t see yet. A wonderful debut.” —Joan Silber, author of Fools and Ideas of Heaven “An unforgettable portrait of what it’s like to be a young woman in contemporary America...A beautiful, funny, and unflinching collection.” —Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, author of Brief Encounters With the Enemy “The characters who appear (and reappear) in Speed Dreaming are full of intelligence, wit, and empathy—as well as regret, fickleness, and occasional selfishness. In other words, they are wholly human. With unbelievable precision and grace, Nicole Haroutunian examines the exquisite, transcendent, and inexplicably eerie moments of her characters’ everyday lives and gives meaning to the smallest details of their worlds. Speed Dreaming is unforgettable.” —Nelly Reifler, author of Elect H. Mouse State Judge “Nicole Haroutunian’s stories are precise little gems. I know I’ll return to them again and again, since there’s something new and beautiful to find in them every time I open this collection.” —Lauren Grodstein, author of The Explanation for Everything “These passionate stories of women and their half disasters, half-rotten men, and fully open hearts are written so nimbly and with such energy and momentum and compassion that I found myself carrying the book from room to room, brushing my teeth and feeding the dog while reading, unwilling to put them down.” —Deb Olin Unferth, author of Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War “Fire, accidents, mysterious disease, and a coyote at a child’s birthday party are only some of the calamities that these protagonists must confront, along with the minor indignities and incongruities of romance and work. Haroutunian brings her complicated young women to life with utter literary confidence. A splendid debut.” —Melvin Jules Bukiet, author of Undertown and A Faker’s Dozen “These honest and perceptive stories contend with the painful contradictions of modern love; that it is precious as it is quotidian; inadequate as it is essential.” —Julie Sarkissian, author of Dear Lucy “Though the stories in Nicole Haroutunian’s debut collection are entirely fictional, things still get too real: friendships are pitted against marriages, a couple’s belongings disappear in a fire, an end date is placed on a life, and two young girls face an imminent kidnapping. Urgent and frantic, there’s plenty more speed within the pages of this book.” —Refinery29 “Haroutunian is smart about contemporary relationships, and her collection will certainly resonate with the Modern Love crowd. Her protagonists, all women, admit to melodrama, but they go one step further than the characters in Girls in that they question what’s behind their woe-is-me antics.” —The Paris Review Blog, Staff Pick Show Less