Origin Stories - by Corinna Vallianatos (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

The stories in Origin Stories take as their subject the sources of love, marriage, motherhood, friendship, artistic ambition, restiveness, and shame. Their characters perceive more than they can explain, want more than they can have, and contend with the bounty and frugality of their relationships. In "This Isn't the Actual Sea," a woman considers that her friend's failure and sudden success have given her the material she needs to write something of her own, if she's willing to risk the friendship to do so. "The Artist's Wife" describes, in a painting stowed in a bowling alley broom closet, the chasm between seeing and being seen. "Dogwood" is a piece of lyric reportage on beauty, family, and survival whose sections range from the narrator's childhood to her son's new adulthood. And "Origin Story" acts as an accounting of the many different states where a woman and her husband have lived, and what it is they've been searching for.

In this keen, meditative collection set in Southern California and Virginia, Corinna Vallianatos dramatizes the bonds of mother and child, the self-destruction of young womanhood, the thrill and bewilderment of friendship, and the power of place.

Origin Stories is filled with humor, longing, beauty, and belief.

Review Quotes

"Vallianatos shines in this wide-ranging collection."--Publishers Weekly

"In graceful, steely prose, Origin Stories conveys Vallianatos's unique understanding of interpersonal relationships--familial, professional, and therapeutic. We often encounter her protagonists in moments of adversity; the strength of their resolve and the ways in which they contend with crises are enchanting, disturbing, and provocative in turn. A superb collection."--Camille Bordas, author of How to Behave in a Crowd

"These dark, devastating stories are love meditations, each offering a secret lesson on how to navigate our new world as woman, daughter, mother, artist. Page-turners each one, full of power, brilliance, and racing energy." --Deb Olin Unferth, author of Barn 8

"You know when you read a book and it's so good, so full of wisdom and inventive turns of phrase and perfectly insightful observation, so ruthlessly attuned to the thrilling dark heart of things, that you start to feel envious and even a bit spooked and begin underlining sentences on every page? Origin Stories is that book, and more. Corinna Vallianatos is a brilliant writer, and this is one of the best new collections I've read in years."--Eric Puchner, author of Dream State

"All I ever want to read is writing that is precise, surprising, and funny; Origin Stories has all of those qualities, and more. Corinna Vallianatos's elegant, agile stories spark with inquiry and insight into what goes on between people, and inside ourselves."--Rachel Khong, author of Real Americans

"Vallianatos is the master of cold laughter, of the marginally amused sideways glance that murders you a little bit. Her output is spare. Precise. Every single word she writes is true."--Jessica Anthony, Electric Literature

About the Author