You Won't Remember This - Tapa dura

"These are necessary stories, which often possess a quality of devastating clarity all too infrequent in short fiction. Each is a rare entree into the ordinary everyday world without the added special effects of all-consuming tragedy. This collection is prime proof that there is nothing, nothing like a collection of short stories to offer an almost Cubist perspective on the way women live." - Cynthia Shearer "You most definitely WILL remember this extraordinary collection. All of Blackwell's finely crafted stories move as easily as an overheard conversation about what is too often hushed in the human heart." - Robert Bausch "In these remarkably intelligent and quirky stories Kate Blackwell sweeps the reader into a tableau as vivid as a Dutch painting, both startling and alive. These are harshly honest and generous stories embroidered with humor." - Patricia Griffith "Throughout this fine first collection, there is a fascinating tension between limpid prose and incisive truth. Kate Blackwell tends to deal with secrets - an unfulfilled desire, a denied knowledge, a hidden love. She writes with especial power and insight about the parts of themselves women give up - or bury - when they marry." - Joyce Johnson"

The twelve stories in Kate Blackwell s debut collection illuminate the lives of men and women who appear as unremarkable as your next-door-neighbor until their lives explode quietly on the page. Her wry, often darkly funny voice describes the repressed underside of a range of middle-class characters living in the South. Blackwell s focus is elementalon marriage, birth, death, and the entanglements of love at all agesbut her gift is to shine a light on these universal situations with such lucidity, it is as if one has never seen them before. In My First Wedding, a twelve-year-old girl attends her cousin s Deep South wedding, where she discovers both mystery and disillusionment and, in the end, finds she s not immune to her family s myth of romantic love. In Heartbeatland, when a young woman s husband dies suddenly, she refuses to sell his Jeep to an importuning gay neighbor. The more she clings to the Jeepand to the memory of her beloved Davidthe more he becomes someone she doesn t recognize. In Queen of the May, a former belle looks for ways to assuage her loneliness in her large new house in the empty Carolina sandhills."