Portraits of a Few of the People I've Made Cry: Stories (AWP) (Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction) [Hardcover]

Christine Sneed (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 30, 2010 | Series: Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction

The ten stories in this striking debut collection examine the perils of love and what it means to live during an era when people will offer themselves, almost unthinkingly, to strangers. Risks and repercussions are never fully weighed. People leap and almost always land on rocky ground. May-December romances flourish in these stories, as do self-doubt and, in many cases, serious regret. Mysterious, dangerous benefactors, dead and living artists, movie stars and college professors, plagiarists, and distinguished foreign novelists are among the many different characters. No one is blameless, but villains are difficult to single out-everyone seemingly bears responsibility for his or her desires and for the outcome of difficult choices so often made hopefully and naively.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Ten finely delineated tales featuring protagonists entangled in less-than-ideal romantic scenarios constitute this year's winner of the Grace Paley Prize. The best stories feature women caught up in liaisons with men either much younger or older. In "Quality of Life," a 26-year-old woman begins seeing a wealthy man more than double her age, Mr. Fulger, who takes her out infrequently and presses money on her, which she takes because it "made her life more easeful." She dates other men her age, but can't seem to stop seeing Mr. Fulger, whose solicitousness eventually has unexpected consequences. In the title story, the granddaughter of a late, famous artist becomes involved with a young artist who may be playing her to obtain the precious notebooks bequeathed to her. Teetering on the brink of self-possession, Sneed's protagonists aren't sure they trust themselves, such as the 55-year old narrator of "By the Way" who can't admit to her much younger lover her fears of faltering memory and mortality. Sneed writes with the care of a fine stylist and the heart of a sympathetic reader. (Nov.) (c)
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From Booklist

Sneed’s first collection was awarded the Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction, an honor clearly deserved given the lucidity of her style, the depth of her perception, and her supple mix of wit, frankness, and compassion. Beautifully interiorized, her provocative stories explore unbalanced relationships, particularly between men and women of differing ages. Sneed also has a rare gift for convincingly articulating the sensations and emotions of sex. A tale of “monstrous rationality” dramatizes a soul-killing arrangement between an elusive older man and a young woman, while a 55-year-old woman, a dancer, in love with a 35-year-old man, confronts the avalanche of fears age delivers. The volatile chemistry of fame and envy stokes the finely textured title story, which portrays a disaffected young woman confounded by the complications following the death of her grandfather, a renowned artist; a delectably unsettling tale about a successful screenwriter at her high-school reunion; and a masterfully counterintuitive story about an English professor and a movie star and his bodyguard. With a surprisingly futuristic and funny closing story, this is an exceptionally smart, connective, and moving collection. --Donna Seaman

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 152 pages
• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press (November 30, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1558498583
• ISBN-13: 978-1558498587
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.8 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #783,098 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Christine Sneed is the author of Portraits of a Few of the People I've Made Cry, a 2009 AWP Grace Paley Prize winner, a finalist for the 2010 Los Angeles Times Book Award (first-fiction category), winner of the 2011 John C. Zacharis First Book Award from Ploughshares, and winner of the Chicago Writers Association 2011 Book of the Year (in the traditionally published fiction category). The San Francisco Chronicle also chose Portraits as one of the fifty best fiction books of 2011. Christine lives in Evanston, Illinois and teaches for the English Department of DePaul University in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago and the graduate writing program at Northwestern University. Portraits of a Few of the People I've Made Cry is her first book, and the ten stories in this collection feature self-questioning protagonists.

Her second book, a novel titled Little Known Facts, will be published by Bloomsbury USA in early 2013. It focuses on a successful Hollywood actor and the effects of his fame on his two ex-wives and his two grown children, especially his son.

Her short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, Best American Short Stories, New England Review, Glimmer Train, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, Meridian, Pleiades, Notre Dame Review, New Ohio Review, Massachusetts Review, River Styx, and a number of other journals. Christine has also published 30 poems in North American literary journals, was awarded an Illinois Arts Council fellowship in poetry in 2003 and has received five Pushcart Prize nominations. Some of her literary influences include Alice Munro, Martin Amis, Jim Harrison, Deborah Eisenberg, Margaret Atwood, Anne Carson, Steve Almond, Penelope Fitzgerald, Penelope Lively and John Updike.

She earned a Master's of Fine Arts degree in creative writing from Indiana University - Bloomington and a Bachelor of Science degree in French language and literature from Georgetown University.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Captivating, November 17, 2010

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Rachel - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Portraits of a Few of the People I've Made Cry: Stories (AWP) (Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction) (Hardcover)

Christine Sneed manages to captivate the reader with each and every story in this collection of ten short stories. Each narrative considers the many different faces of romantic love, some of them ugly and disfigured. Each protagonist manages to capture the reader's affection and sympathy with their quirks, desires, and fears. Every character is distinctly human, the lines between villain and hero blurred. I think that this book is targeted for a mainly female audience, and women will definitely enjoy Sneed's many characters and perhaps identify themselves in one- or a few- of the heroines. Men may also enjoy this collection and obtain some insight into the female psyche. Everyone can definitely take something away after reading these stories about men and women and relationships and and the often questionable emotion of love.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Messy connections (4.25*s), May 18, 2011

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J. Grattan "Ideas can move the world" (Lawrenceville, GA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Portraits of a Few of the People I've Made Cry: Stories (AWP) (Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction) (Hardcover)

In this sharply written, perceptive collection of ten stories set in the Chicago area including small, insular towns, the author does nothing to dispel the impression that human connections are never easy, especially when turning sexual, and are fraught with expectations, naïveté, self-doubts, social pressures, and advantages and disadvantages based on age, money, social position, etc.

Coercion, both on a personal level and by the community, can also intrude on relationships. In perhaps the best and most cautionary of the stories, "Quality of Life," twenty-something Lyndsey, though leery at first, allows herself to be drawn into a clandestine relationship with a generous older man, Mr. Fulger. His mysteriousness turns ominous when she wants to terminate this dead-end affair.

In "Walled City," the last and shortest story in the book and a bit of an odd fit, speech is literally banned by the city fathers to facilitate community harmony. In "For Once in Your Life," community pressures conveyed through word of mouth - the beauty shop or the bi-weekly women's association meeting, are more subtly applied, but are no less effective.

Two stories are concerned with the unsettling effects of a celebrity being introduced, first in a high school reunion and secondly in a college literature course. Resentments and anxieties that suddenly emerge have to be reconciled.

Perhaps the most prominent theme in these stories is in the dynamics of how age differentials impact establishing and maintaining intimate relationships. In "Twelve + Twelve," the comfort that a young RN provides the grieving father of her deceased friend turns romantic, but not without the complications of the ex-wife. "By the Way" shows that lies about one's age, especially by an older woman, always lurk and can easily undermine any connection.

In some of the stories, the price of acting on a strong attraction or maintaining a strongly sensual, though problematic, relationship is explored. What is one willing to barter, give up, or embark upon?

All of the stories are told from a female's perspective, though that hardly limits their applicability. The stories, in addition to flowing well, have any number of short, insightful observations. They are not particularly depressing or optimistic; for the most part, they are well within the tell-it-like-it-is genre. Connections are messy and people have a difficult time figuring it all out and determining what to do.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A book I'll turn to again and again, March 12, 2011

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Meredith - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Portraits of a Few of the People I've Made Cry: Stories (AWP) (Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction) (Hardcover)

I must admit that I've never been a big reader of short fiction. It's not that I'm not interested in the genre, and it's not that I don't cherish a really beautifully executed short story. I think it's just that outside of reading them for college classes, I don't seek out short stories. Like most readers these days, I'm drawn to the longer narrative, the familiarity of the same characters painted on page after page of a long story. Perhaps it's laziness, but I enjoy not having to reimagine a new world, characters, and situation every ten or twenty pages. It's easier to continue lingering in a world of the familiar with the novel.

How much Christine Sneed's book has changed my opinion of what a short story collection can accomplish. This book was so engrossing, so easily addicting, that I found myself very quickly slipping into the world of each of the new characters. This book made me nearly miss my train stop one morning. Sneed's characters speak so uniquely and confessionally that they easily take form and start leading the reader into their worlds. Within one or two pages of each new story I found myself quickly acclimating to the new climate of the story and feeling the tug of believable, human, and understandable tension. While all of the voices in "Portraits" are female, I was so astounded at how different they each were--young, menopausal, insecure, frustrated, hopeful to a fault--and how relatable. I'm in my late twenties, trying to find a career path, new to love and relationships, and I found it so interesting that I felt such a connection to the protagonist in the story, "By the Way." Even though she's in her late fifties, divorced, close to wrapping up her career as a dance teacher, this woman's voice reached out deeply into my own experience. I could understand her fears, her insecurities, her hopes, as if they were my own. I was astounded that Sneed could create character after character that could speak so honestly about the human experience, and yet each character was so remarkably different and believably drawn.

I will turn to this book again and again not just because it is a joy to read, but because it will serve as an excellent example for my own writing.

And Just as I think it's perhaps a bit lazier to read a novel, I imagine that it might be a bit easier to write one. Only once does the author conceive the main characters and begin to build the world of conflict around them. Again and again in the short story collection the writer is asked to find a voice for their players, and set them in a new and interesting situation. And several times the author must swiftly and deftly dig her character's out of the mess she's sunk them in. Sneed does this so poetically and effortlessly she has truly given me a new appreciation for the short story. And she's written a collection that speaks of larger themes of love, helplessness, and resurrection that bind the stories together in that satisfying feel of a novel. I already can't wait for her next collection.