What We Do with the Wreckage - (Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction) by Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

The stories in Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum's new collection are about finding resilience in the face of adversity. Following losses big and small, environmental and familial, universal and personal, the best of us try to recover and rebuild. Lunstrum asks: How do we keep going in the face of grief or disappointment when love fails or disaster strikes? How do we maintain the stamina to carry on in an uncertain world? The characters in her stories are living these questions and learning to reconstruct themselves, their families, and their futures from the wreckage of their broken pasts.

Review Quotes

How rare is the writer who truly understands invisibility: the invisibility of being young and the very different sort that plagues those grown old; the fraught invisibility of motherhood and that of being a girl in this world who is disappearing from the inside out. Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum sees these people, gives them form and substance through language that is graceful and nuanced, at times humorous, nearly always compassionate, often (enough) hopeful. A beautiful, deeply compelling collection.--Lori Ostlund "author of The Bigness of the World"

The best short story collections are artful works of juxtaposition, and Sundberg Lunstrum is definitely aware of how the stories in Wreckage build on each other, one after the other. Even if none of the stories are linked by characters or plots, their thematic ties are so strong that Wreckage reads like a novel.--Paul Constant "The Seattle Review of Books"

About the Author

KIRSTEN SUNDBERG LUNSTRUM is the author of two collections of short fiction: This Life She's Chosen and Swimming with Strangers. Her short fiction and essays have appeared widely in journals, including One Story, the American Scholar, Willow Springs, and Southern Humanities Review. She is also a recipient of a PEN/O. Henry Prize and teaches high school English near Seattle, Washington.