This Life She's Chosen: Stories [Hardcover]

Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 10, 2005

"Kirsten Lunstrum's stories are gem stones, multi-faceted, highly polished, more and more complicated the closer you look," says Pam Houston. Each finely tuned story in this remarkable debut collection captures a pivotal moment in the life of a woman trying to reconcile past expectations with present, usually unplanned, developments. In the title story, a woman who decided she really should be French visits her married daughter, who once again becomes tangled in a web of lies and disapprovals. In "Picnic," a new spin on family politics emerges during an outing with mysterious Aunt Vivian. In "The Virtuoso," a young violin prodigy's talent disrupts the harmony of her teacher and his wife. Bringing to mind the work of Elizabeth Bishop and Alice Munro, Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum's stories form a sophisticated and graceful collection.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Lunstrum's short stories are by turns terse and densely written as they depict women making their way consciously and otherwise through unresolved relationships. In "Surfacing," Miriam is part of a boat-party foursome, all drinking wine straight from the bottles. Because she's numbed as much by everyday married life as by alcohol, the sight of a young child presumably drowning only elicits in her a silent countdown of the seconds he's been below the surface. "Picnic" tunes in to the never-ending rivalry between two sisters as observed by a daughter and niece. And in the title story, a young woman is visited by a larger-than-life, quasi-bohemian mother declared "too much for us" many years prior by her father: a woman who's been living abroad and fancy-free for years, and who disdains her married daughter's large house and bourgeois lifestyle in which the party guests are all work friends of the husband's and all the women are in suits, "seed pearls around every neck." An auspicious debut. Whitney Scott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

"These tales are polished tidbits, like translucent stones you find on the beach: smooth to the touch but full of veins and cracks of underlying complexity. You can feel each story spreading in multiple directions, leaving you wanting more." -Seattle Times

"Still and hauntingly ambiguous, these collected stories seem inspired, even inhabited, by the coastal fog of the Pacific Northwest, where the author grew up and where most of the pieces are set. This is the fiction of mood and sensibility, not of incident. Accordingly, it is fiction about women, and about the interactions between them... These fictions evoke ongoing relationships that seem to stretch like a timeline fore and aft, passing briefly through one crystallizing moment." -Boston Globe

"This Life She's Chosen, finely wrought stories by Puget Sound area native Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum, herald the arrival of a striking new talent. In her mid-20s, Lunstrum writes with a quiet confidence rare in so young an author, and we willingly surrender ourselves to her sure and steady prose...this collection marks an impressive debut, written with an admirable restraint that throws into sharper relief the emotional turmoil of the characters. There is a clean whiff of the prairie - reminiscent of Willa Cather - in these tales of stoic people soldiering on as best they can through their lives. Lunstrum's next book will be eagerly awaited." -Tacoma News Tribune

"Northwest author Lunstrum's measured approach yields moments of lovely, imagistic immediacy: "Her body was soft, dimpled just above her backside, her hips lined with fine pale stretch marks like hairline fractures on a porcelain dish." Read one at a time, these stories have an atmospheric sort of power, like a melancholy song that haunts the listener hours after it's heard." -Seattle Weekly

"A fine debut collection of engaging short stories, many focused on dynamics between individuals." -Seattle Post-Intelligencer

"Lunstrum takes readers on a sensory tour of the West Coast, from Anchorage to Omak, from Spokane to Seattle and on down to northern California, detailing the landscape with the same sensitive focus as she does her characters. This Life is delicate in nature, bringing forth the subtlest tensions between mothers and daughters, husbands and wives. Lunstrum's language is deft and fluid.... It's from within this soft insight that the messages emerge, messages about grace and letting go." -Spokane Inlander

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 192 pages
• Publisher: Chronicle Books; First edition (February 10, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811845133
• ISBN-13: 978-0811845137
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.7 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,783,904 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Unexpected, Fresh, and Strong, February 9, 2005

By 

A. Rodriguez (Spokane, WA, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: This Life She's Chosen: Stories (Hardcover)

First-time author Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum's "This Life She's Chosen" is far from anything I might normally pick up for pleasure reading, but after hearing Ms. Lunstrum read at a bookstore near my home, I couldn't resist. The subtle elegance of her prose, the tension and complexity she earns from seemingly simple character relationships, and the narrative control she exhibits throughout this collection form an engaging, memorable read. The book actually delivers on Pam Houston's ecstatic jacket blurb. Look for this author to have a long, successful career.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars lovely for an afternoon in a hammock, September 10, 2008

By 

tidepooler "TY" (CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: This Life She's Chosen (Paperback)

I'm not an avid reader, and I typically prefer non-fiction, but I really enjoyed this collection of short stories. I do read the short stories in the New Yorker to keep me exposed to new writers and styles. These short stories are great for an afternoon when you want to drift into another life for a spell. I finished them in one lazy, summer weekend. I like how they lingered in my mind. I highly recommend them.

3 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Disappointed, April 5, 2006

By 

Avid Reader (Princeton, NJ USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: This Life She's Chosen: Stories (Hardcover)

There was some hype about this book - it made it to a few 'Great New Books' Lists, so I was eager to read it. I haven't been able to finish it and have abandoned it for more interesting (captivating) works. The short stories are adequately written and could actually have been something if there was ever a purpose to the writing. They leave you scratching your head and saying, "so, where's the end - what's the point?" It did not hold my attention, I was not engaged by it, which is why it was shelved before finishing in favor of something else.