My Escapee

Selected by Jhumpa Lahiri for the Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction, Vallianatos’s debut collection features female protagonists who are smart, flawed, and alienated but striving for connection. In the title story, Genevieve, an elderly lesbian living in a nursing home and dealing with the confusion of age and memory, longs for her lover, who seems to be traveling around the world. “It’s dizzying, the way the past unfolds in crystal bits, and the present’s this faulty plateau,” Genevieve says. While the story relies on an overused plot device, moments of insight make it successful. “Sink Home” focuses on middle-aged women in the midst of affairs; in “Salvo” a young woman marries on a whim; a group of college girls attend a fraternity’s ball in “Celebrants”; and a young girl, in “Examination,” bails on a gifted-child test. The knock-out story “Posthumous Fragments of Veronica Penn” is representative of the collection’s strengths. The story, assembled as a montage of memory, leaps in time and logic. It’s disorienting at first, but slowly a collage of Veronica is formed. She realizes, slowly, how hard it is to comprehend herself and her own actions, let alone understand the depths of anyone else. It’s mesmerizing to see it unfurl. Vallianatos writes with insight, humor, and elegance. (Nov.)