Certain American States | Granta

  • Published: 02/05/2019
  • ISBN: 9781783782215
  • 129x20mm
  • 208 pages

Certain American States

Catherine Lacey

Certain states are hard to shake, or so Catherine Lacey’s characters find in these twelve tales of love, loss and longing.

A grieving wife gives away the shirts her husband has left behind. A flirtatious widow takes a honeymooning couple to see her husband’s grave. A businessman working for a shadowy organization known as ‘The Company’, checks-in to a room in a strange and remarkable hotel.

With a spare but poetically concentrated style, Catherine Lacey vividly captures the addled, bombed-out, wryly fuzzy perspectives of her lost and drifting characters. These are stories of mystery and brooding, wintry beauty

Colin Barrett, author of, Young Skins

Lacey is playful and smart, one of a generation of American women who seem entirely unafraid

‘Best Summer Books’ selected by Anne Enright, Guardian

Profoundly playful and piercingly good... The prose is full of mathematical pleasures. You don't have to read them, but you really should

Anne Enright, Guardian

The Author

Catherine Lacey is the author of the novels Nobody Is Ever Missing, The Answers, Pew, and Biography of X, and the short story collection Certain American States. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award and twice been shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize, and was named one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists.

More about the author →

From the Same Author

Catherine Lacey on Granta.com

Fiction | Granta 162

Biography of X

Catherine Lacey

‘Grief has a warring logic; it always wants something impossible, something worse and something better.’

An extract from Biography of X by Catherine Lacey.

Fiction | Granta Books

Pew

Catherine Lacey

‘The church has no thoughts. The church is brick and glass. If they ever slept there, they would see that.’

In Conversation | Granta Books

Catherine Lacey | Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists

Catherine Lacey & Luke Neima

Catherine Lacey discuses voice, characterization and the minute details that bring a story to life