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Delicate and assured, the stories in
My Escapee illuminate unseen forces in women's lives: the shameful thought, the stifled hope, the subterranean stresses of marriage, friendship, and family. Grappling with lost memories, escaped time, the longing to be loved, and the instinct for autonomy, the stories peer inside their characters' minds to their benign delusions, their triumphs and defeats.
A girl taking a test for admittance to a selective school finds that what she loves most of all is the ordinary. A lonely young woman, sick of being sick, swaps places with her nurse. A college student deploys her more charming roommate to discover the secret rituals of an all-male club on campus. And in the title story, a woman in a nursing home receives mysterious missives from her longtime lover recalling fragments of their old life together.
About the author
Corinna Vallianatos's stories have appeared in
Tin House, A Public Space, McSweeney's, The Kenyon Review,
The Idaho Review, and elsewhere. The recipient of fellowships from The MacDowell Colony and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, she lives in Claremont, California with her husband and son.
My Escapee was named a
New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice.
