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Title details for Single, Carefree, Mellow by Katherine Heiny - Available

Single, Carefree, Mellow

Stories

by Katherine Heiny
Cassandra Campbell
Audiobook
2 of 2 copies available
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2 of 2 copies available

“Katherine Heiny's work does something magical: elevates the mundane so that it has the stakes of a mystery novel, gives women's interior lives the gravity they so richly deserve — and makes you laugh along the way.”
—Lena Dunham
Single, Carefree, Mellow is that rare and wonderful thing: a debut that is superbly accomplished, endlessly entertaining, and laugh-out-loud funny.
 
Maya is in love with both her boyfriend and her boss. Sadie’s lover calls her as he drives to meet his wife at marriage counseling. Gwen pines for her roommate, a man who will hold her hand but then tells her that her palm is sweaty. And Sasha agrees to have a drink with her married lover’s wife and then immediately regrets it. These are the women of Single, Carefree, Mellow, and in these eleven sublime stories they are grappling with unwelcome houseguests, disastrous birthday parties, needy but loyal friends, and all manner of love, secrets, and betrayal.
 
In “Cranberry Relish” Josie’s ex—a man she met on Facebook—has a new girlfriend he found on Twitter. In “Blue Heron Bridge” Nina is more worried that the Presbyterian minister living in her garage will hear her kids swearing than about his finding out that she’s sleeping with her running partner. And in “The Rhett Butlers” a teenager loses her virginity to her history teacher and then outgrows him.
 
In snappy, glittering prose that is both utterly hilarious and achingly poignant, Katherine Heiny chronicles the ways in which we are unfaithful to each other, both willfully and unwittingly. Maya, who appears in the title story and again in various states of love, forms the spine of this linked collection, and shows us through her moments of pleasure, loss, deceit, and kindness just how fickle the human heart can be.
Read by a Full Cast:
THE DIVE BAR, read by Julia Whelan
 
HOW TO GIVE THE WRONG IMPRESSION, read by Emily Rankin
 
SINGLE, CAREFREE, MELLOW, read by Rebecca Lowman
 
BLUE HERON BRIDGE, read by Cassandra Campbell
 
THAT DANCE YOU DO, read by Julia Whelan
 
DARK MATTER, read by Rebecca Lowman
 
CRANBERRY RELISH, read by Cassandra Campbell
 
THOUGHTS OF A BRIDESMAID, read by Julia Whelan
 
THE RHETT BUTLERS, read by Emily Rankin
 
GRENDEL’S MOTHER, read by Rebecca Lowman
 
ANDORRA, read by Cassandra Campbell

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    February 3, 2015

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9780553410020
      • File size: 206226 KB
      • Duration: 07:09:38

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      This series of short stories, generally centering around shallow, unkind, and unlikable women cheating on their respective spouses or boyfriends, is an effort aiming for profound that ends up profoundly missing its mark. All four narrators adopt some level of condescension in their voices as they minimally distinguish each character. Each tries to inject some whisper of depth into the characters, but they're so one-dimensional that listeners fail to care about them. A.C.P. © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      September 15, 2014
      Dissatisfied teenagers and bored housewives, clueless boyfriends and cuckolded husbands, and 11 variations on the recurrent theme of infidelity and its fallout populate Heiny’s first collection of stories. “The Dive Bar” shows a woman cajoled into having drinks with her lover’s more sophisticated wife; unsurprisingly, the tête–à–tête ends doesn’t end well. “Blue Heron Bridge” finds a physique-obsessed mother consumed by an affair with an aging personal trainer. In the second-person “The Rhett Butlers,” a teenager embarks on a tour of seedy hotel rooms and blah sex with her smarmy high school history teacher. A man leaves a dalliance with a woman he met on Facebook for a gal whose tweets he admires in “Cranberry Relish.” Three of the offerings—“Dark Matter,” “Grendel’s Mother,” and the title story—follow the romantic entanglements and discontented musings of one character through marriage to her long-time boyfriend and pregnancy. But it’s hard to care about her fate when her snarky asides about life’s superficialities and near-constant critique of herself (and her relationship) continue unabated, despite her changed circumstances. First printing: 50,000 copies.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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