Why I Don't Write: And Other Stories - Paperback

by Susan Minot (Author)

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK - A "clear-eyed and fearless" (The New York Times Book Review) collection of ten short stories from the award-winning author of Evening

"Tender, precise, emotional, insightful, and funny."--JULIANNE MOORE

A writer dryly catalogs the myriad reasons she cannot write; an artist bicycles through a protest encampment in lower Manhattan and ruminates on an elusive lover; an old woman on her deathbed calls out for a man other than her husband; a hapless fifteen-year-old boy finds himself in sexual peril; two young people in the 1990s fall helplessly in love, then bicker just as helplessly, tortured by jealousy and mistrust.

In each of these stories Susan Minot explores the difficult geometry of human relations, the lure of love and physical desire, and the lifelong quest for meaning and connection. Her characters are all searching for truth, in feeling and in action, as societal norms are upended and justice and coherence flounder.

Urgent and immediate, stunningly observed, deeply felt, and gorgeously written, the stories in Why I Don't Write showcase an author at the top of her form.

"Intimate, adventurous, stark and lyrical . . . Few short story collections shine as brightly."--Portland Press-Herald

Author Biography

Susan Minot is an award-winning novelist, short-story writer, poet, and screenwriter. Her first novel, Monkeys, was published in a dozen countries and won the Prix Femina Étranger in France. Her novel Evening was a worldwide bestseller and became a major motion picture. She lives with her daughter in New York City and on an island off the coast of Maine.