Short stories in this collection have won: PEN Fiction Prize, a Virginia Fiction Fellowship, the Lip Service Prose Prize, a Pushcart Prize nomination, Negative Capability Award, William Faulkner Short Story Finalist and other awards. These short stories about families in turmoil and children in peril, from a homeless mother forced to put her son in foster care to a suburban mother afraid of passing her water phobia to her son. Braxton, North Carolina is the where in these stories, an imaginary coastal town adjacent to Camp Corregidor, a stopover for recruits on their way to Vietnam and later to Iraq. Braxton is the home front, where citizens battle alcoholism, marital breakups, and scandal. In Braxton, when a sister or father does wrong, the whole family shares the blame. Even Braxton's babysitters are dangerous, snooping, stealing secrets - and husbands. But love abounds. Sisters driven apart by scandal reunite when their father remarries. The babysitter who ran off with the mayor is welcomed back into her family when she returns to Braxton pregnant. A woman on the verge of being committed to an asylum for alcoholism is pulled back from the brink by a devoted friend. "The World As I Know It" won a PEN Syndicate Fiction Prize; "The Yellow Sneakers" won a Dexter Review Short Story Prize; "Jazzland" won the Lip Service Prose Prize; and an earlier version of "Falling Women" won a Virginia Fiction Fellowship for Ms. Herbert.

Falling Women and Other Stories

Herbert, Ellen

Literature & Fiction

ShelfStealers

Winner of the Maryland Writer's Association 2014 Novel Award.  In the summer of 1944, Edwina, known as Eddie, a young high school teacher of English and German travels to Washington to work for the war effort unaware a killer is there, targeting government girls. And he's closer than she could ever imagine. Eddie finds Washington crowded and exciting, a city at war, where folks act as if each day is their last. She rushes at life, longing to live her own version of Casablanca, believing the only enemies are Over There, the Nazis, Hitler, Hirohito. And that every man in uniform is a hero.   The Last Government Girl, filled with heart-pounding tension, is peopled with extraordinarily alive characters, a mulatto crime photographer battling Jim Crow laws, a bootlegger's niece enjoying stolen moonshine money, and a beautiful Jewish department store heiress hiding a terrible secret.Ellen Herbert's fiction has won a PEN Fiction, a Virginia Fiction Fellowship, and many other awards. See ellenherbert.info             

The Last Government Girl

Genre Fiction

Loyola College/Apprentice House

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Herbert, Ellen. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Herbert, Ellen

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Herbert, Ellen. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Falling Women and Other Stories

The Last Government Girl