by Lauren Groff
First published 2023
This collection brings together twenty-five stories by Nancy Hale, a writer whose work appeared regularly in The New Yorker alongside contemporaries like John Cheever but has since faded from memory. Lauren Groff has selected pieces that span Hale's career, showcasing her complex female characters. In "Midsummer," a teenage girl in Connecticut spirals into delirium as she grapples with emerging sexuality. "That Woman" follows a young New Yorker who feels displaced during a visit to Virginia. "Flotsam" presents a New England widow searching for alcohol while watching her grandson. The stories explore childhood memories, the brutality of electroshock treatment, and racial tensions. Hale created women who resist simple categorization: fragile yet strong, ordinary yet striking, sometimes morally ambiguous. Her characters navigate domestic spaces and social expectations with surprising depth. The collection reveals a writer who understood female psychology decades before such portrayals became common in literature.
Genres: short-stories, literary-fiction, american-fiction, 20th-century, 21st-century
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: complex-characters, morally-ambiguous, resistance-to-categorization
Setting: Connecticut, New England, New York, Virginia
Period: 20th-century
384 pages · Paperback · Library of America
Content warnings: mental-illness