PEOPLE LIKE YOU by Margaret Malone
Finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award
Winner of the Balcones Fiction Prize
Named a Best Book of the Year by Powell's Books
A Powell's Books "25 Books to Read Before You Die" Selection
The 2016 PEN/Hemingway Award Finalist citation for People Like You:
"In plainspoken American speech, with great delicacy and wit, the nine stories
in Margaret Malone's People Like You constantly beguile and surprise.
With Chekhov they share both compassion and brevity; they share with Carver and
Beattie a confidence in the unforced sentiment of unadorned prose;
and in their matter-of-fact humor, which is often laugh-out-loud funny,
they tap a long tradition of American humorists stretching from Mark Twain
to Lorrie Moore. What sets them apart are Malone's protagonists:
dark, troubled women unafraid to puncture the pieties or to confront the void.
Three of these stories involve a beleaguered wife named Cheryl whose life
gains real emotional heft despite the often absurd predicaments she finds herself in,
predicaments that look and feel all too much like real life. That is the
great pleasure here: these artful stories have the force of truth in every line."
(Judges Joshua Ferris, Alexandra Marshall, and Jay Parini)
The 2015 BALCONES FICTION PRIZE citation for People Like You:
"Margaret Malone's People Like You is a masterfully minimalist collection of lives lived poorly but with the best of intentions. Her stories are powerful, sad, and plain-spoken, and this debut collection takes the normative-yet-desperate circuits of the day-to-day that Bobbie Anne Mason and Frederick Barthelme brought to the forefront of American short fiction and makes them both new again and powerfully affecting. These are marvelous and worthy stories, and very much deserving of recognition." (Judge John Blair, author of American Standard)
