Out of the Girls' Room and into the Night (Iowa Short Fiction Award) [Paperback]

Thisbe Nissen (Author)

Book Description

Series: Iowa Short Fiction Award | Publication Date: September 1, 1999

Out of the Girls' Room and into the Night is a spirited, offbeat collection of stories, elongated riffs on that thing we call …love. All manner of love stories: thwarted love stories, imaginary love stories, love stories offhand and obsessive, philosophical love stories, erudite and amusing love stories.

“People don't meet because they both like Burmese food,” says one character, “or because someone's sister has a friend who's single and new in town, or because Billy's nose happened to crook just slightly to the left at an angle that made me want to weep…People don't fall in love with each other …they just fall into love.”

Everyone does it: women of fierce independence, men of thin character, rambling Deadheads, gay teenage girls, despondent Peace Corps volunteers, anorexic Broadway theatre dancers, the eager, the grieving, the uncommunicative. Even the confused do it. And they don't just fall in love with each other—they fall in love with certain moments and familiar places, with things as ephemeral as gestures and as evanescent as sunlight.

Quirky, real, idealistic, deluded, bohemian, and true, these are people who can—and often do—fall in love with a pair of ears, August afternoons, saucers of vitamins, New Age carpenters, and dead bumblebees. And if there's something they can teach us, it's how to conceive of alternative worlds and the terror and the exhilaration of venturing outside the confines of the lives we know and making our way into a dark, glittering unknown.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Moving from the chaotic world of adolescence and into adulthood is the theme that links Nissen's bittersweet collection of 25 fierce and quirky short stories, the winner of the John Simmons Fiction Award. Familiar issues are dealt with innovativelyAyoung women (and some men) deal with eating disorders, illness, death, infidelity and love. The cast is an eclectic crew of original, sometimes bizarre, yet recognizable characters with names like Silver Tarkington, Wing MacArdle, Mo?t and Zagarella. The settings range from Santa Cruz to the Midwest, Manhattan to Paris. With self-deprecating and wry humor, Nissen's characters frequently improvise unusual answers for difficult, confusing questions. In "Way Back When in the Now Before Now," Sari, a city-savvy teenager whose mother is dying of cancer, slips into the bed of her best friend's brother, searching for comfort in "the hot sleepy boy-smell with its acrid twinge of sex." "The Estate" charts the fleeting passage of time as experienced by a close-knit group of friends and family summering together annually at a carriage house on a large property. Other stories feature young hippies hoping to make a Grateful Dead show; a group of eight women living in a feminist co-op; a child coping with being pushed too hard by ambitious, cold parents. In these tales, as in others, Nissen displays a sharp talent for fresh detail and dialogue: Barb-Jean, a soprano who conserves her voice for days at a time, communicates through scraps of paper. "When we cleaned the house... at the end of the season we'd find fragments of conversation stuck between the couch cushions and tucked into kitchen drawers: how many people? How many ears? Portuguese on her mother's side I think, SotA5 lettersAends in a y." Many of the stories in this warm, fearless collection trace college love affairs and exquisite, if tentative, sexual explorations between young women. Where a few tales are merely good, several of them are stellar, marking Nissan as an assured writer whose wide-ranging interest in varied people and life situations creates lively fiction. (Nov.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From School Library Journal

YA-The two dozen stories here are contemporary, memorable, and thought-provoking. All deal with love-requited, denied, outgrown, and enduring. The characters vary in age and gender, and the level of their attachments ranges from the disillusionment of a preschooler with a highly intelligent but mean schoolmate to the adjustments required in a 25-year marriage when Alzheimer's disease encroaches. Characters engage in the casual sex and drug use integral to the culture of Deadheads and Jerry Garcia. Several of the stories deal with the problems of anorexia as they affect the lives of young women, their parents, and, in one striking case, a pet cat. The title story is a study in contrasts as it depicts the gripping passion of a middle-aged science teacher for a teen who had indulged him once and now "couldn't care less." Another story concerns the bizarre accidents plaguing a group of eight college housemates. The writing evokes definite periods and stages in the development of personality and awareness.
Frances Reiher, Fairfax County Public Library, VA
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 262 pages
• Publisher: University Of Iowa Press; 1 edition (September 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0877456917
• ISBN-13: 978-0877456919
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 5.6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,214,615 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars from The Austin Chronicle, December 8, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Out of the Girls' Room and into the Night (Iowa Short Fiction Award) (Paperback)

Book ReviewsBY AMANDA EYRE WARD November 26, 1999: Out of the Girls' Room and Into the Night by Thisbe Nissen The expression of love is the center of Out of the Girls' Room and Into the Night, an awe-inspiring collection of short stories by Thisbe Nissen, winner of the John Simmons Short Fiction Award. Nissen's characters are young and yearning, and they come together in lovely and unexpected ways. A young video clerk in "The Mushroom Girl" pours his heart out into his beloved's intercom: "I think you think I'm crazy, and I'm not. I'm not crazy. It's just that I see a chance for something I think could make me happy in a world that is a generally not very happy place, and I can't just give up and walk away from that without doing everything I know how to do to make it happen." This flustered suitor is probably the most eloquent in the book; Roz Rozenzweig in "The Rather Unlikely Courtship of Edwin Anderson and Roz Rosenzweig" proposes marriage by calling to her lover, "C'mon, Gimp, waddaya say?" Words are not the only means of admitting love in Nissen's stories. In "Accidental Love," Lilith, a high school senior, listens to an older woman who tells her, "Love is an entity unto itself. There are patches of it all over the place. It's not really tangible, but it's there, pools of it." Lilith takes the woman's words to heart when she finds Steff, the boy she loves, fixing lights underneath a Christmas tree: "The TV is perched on a rolling cart, and I wheel it over to where we can watch before I crawl underneath the tree myself. I curl around Steff and bury my hands into the wool belly of his sweater, and we just lie like that for a while: spoons under the tree in this pocket of candle-blue." Although Nissen's characters are generally young and blessed -- traveling Deadheads, college housemates, wealthy New York teens -- Nissen bestows them with earnesty and explores their desires carefully and with gravity. This is a marked change from the cynical city gals currently in fashion in contemporary literature, and I found myself astonishingly moved by her character's simplest movements, like those of the lovers in "Fundamentals of Communication." In a college classroom, the lovers "sit, shifting occasionally, glancing at the glowing wall clock, waiting for 9:15. I can't see them as well now, in the shadows, but I catch the occasional movement in one of their hands, the caress of a finger, press of palm." They seem to have realized another character's observation that safety is "a point of contact." And perhaps, Nissen suggests, that's what love is as well.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A spunky, heartfelt debut., November 5, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Out of the Girls' Room and into the Night (Iowa Short Fiction Award) (Paperback)

I was very much impressed by this book. Nissen's stories really live on the page, and many of them have been difficult for me to forget. Usually, I'll read through a story collection in a day or two, but I found myself reading this one more slowly: I wanted to hold on to each story for a while--to let the feelings it touched off in me finish washing through me before I moved on. I was reminded of the writing of Abby Frucht, and Elizabeth McCracken, and (a little bit) of Lorrie Moore: Thisbe Nissen has the same talent that they do for opening the joy of her characters up into pain, and vice versa. Also, her characters have the same sort of camouflaged vulnerability. Too much of the fiction being published today seems to deny that people can matter to one another, that they can either hurt one another or preserve one another, but Nissen never forgets this. Even when her characters try to close themselves off to the people around them, those people always come bounding back into their lives. This book is being published by a university press and deserves a wider readership than I'm afraid it's going to get. If you have a chance, you should pick it up. The stories carry a real emotional power, and they will stay with you for a long time.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sharp, Sweet, Stealthy, October 13, 2004

By 

M Stream (New Hampshire) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Out of the Girls' Room and Into the Night: Stories (Paperback)

I don't know why I waited so long to read this stellar collection. I agree with the other reviewers--the very best selections might be "Flowers in the Dustbin" and "Grog" and "Poison in the Human Machine," and of course the title story, but they're all good with moments or lines that are amazing. There is geniune emotion in Nissen's stories, and geniune insight in girls growing up, which is what I look for and hope for but rarely ever find. I haven't enjoyed a book so much since Jennifer Paddock's novel, A SECRET WORD, came out in the spring. It's that good! I couldn't recommend OUT OF THE GIRLS' ROOM AND INTO THE NIGHT more highly.