In 1997, at the distinguished Siddons School on Manhattan's Upper East Side, the school year opens with distressing news: Astra Dell is suffering from a rare disease. Astra's friends try to reconcile the sick girl's suffering with their own fierce longings and impetuous attachments. Car writes unsparing letters, which the dirty Marlene, in her devotion, then steals. Other classmates carry on: The silly team of Suki and Alex pursue Will Bliss while the subversive Lisa Van de Ven makes dates with Miss Wilkes. The world of private schools and privilege in New York City is funny, poignant, cruel, and at its heart is a sick girl, Astra Dell, "that pale girl from the senior class, the dancer with all the hair, the red hair, knotted or braided or let to fall to her waist, a fever and she consumed." National Book Award Finalist Christine Schutt has created a wickedly original tale of innocence, daring and illness.

All Souls

Literature & Fiction

Schütt, Christine

United States

Houghton, mifflin, harcourt

In this elegiac and luminous novel, which John Ashbery called "an amazing achievement" and Mary Gordon dubbed "a wholly original endeavor," Christine Schutt gives voice to the feast of memory, the mystery of the mad and missing, and the power of words. Set in the Midwest, where Florida represents a faraway paradise, this novel tells the story of Alice Fivey. Fatherless since she was seven, Alice is left in the care of her relatives at the age of ten, when her mother, whose "toenails winked in the foil bed we knew for Florida," is institutionalized. Alice is moved from place to place, remaining still while others try to mold her into someone different from her mother. She consoles herself with books and becomes a storyteller herself as she moves into adulthood, ever further from the desolation of her mother's actions and closer to the meaning of her own experience. Told in brief scenes of spare beauty, Florida is a graceful and gripping tale of family, forgiveness, and creation of the self.

Florida

Genre Fiction

Mariner Books

With prose that is at once sensual and spare, dreamlike and deliberate, Christine Schutt gives voice in this collection to what most keep hidden. Many of the stories take place in the home, where what is behind the thin domestic barriers of doors tends toward violence, unseemly sexual encounters, and mental anguish. Schutt opens these doors in sudden, bold moments and exposes the unsettling intimacy of the rooms and corridors of our innermost lives. Yet at the same time, her characters are often hopeful, even optimistic. Startling and smartly wrought, A Day, a Night, Another Day, Summer is a breathtaking follow-up to Schutt's widely revered debut collection, Nightwork, and her critically acclaimed debut novel, Florida, which was a National Book Award Finalist.

A Day, a Night, Another Day, Summer

Harper Paperbacks

In this, her first collection of stories, Christine Schutt gives exquisite and provocative form to feelings and memories. Nightwork is a masterful dreamwork, revealing our lives with the startling clarity we long for.A young woman remembers, after a forbidden embrace, the exact quality of her father's skin, "pitted and stubbled under all that color." A girl recalls the strange kingdom that was her grandfather's estate, a place she came to inhabit only through betrayal.Romantic linkings are often unexpected: mother-son, father-daughter, mother-lover-daughter. In "What Have You Been Doing?" a mother teaches her son how to kiss. In "Dead Men," a woman finds herself unable to be touched by her new lover without experiencing intensely erotic recollections of the lover who is gone.The stories are sensually detailed and sometimes shocking. Hands, feet, breasts ... bodies are known, as they are known, mostly in bed. "Before the dead man, she had slept by herself with her hands to herself like a poultice."Here is an Everywoman, voiced from familiar enclosures: a house in the country, an apartment in town. The muted landscapes, too, are an Everyplace made of "wind and slashes of high blue sky in the heads of furious trees."Schutt's fearlessness, her passionate honesty, is the source for the language of these splendid stories -- night worlds, which may disturb our composure but enable us to dream while awake.

Nightwork: Stories

Random House Value Publishing

In this, her first collection of stories, Christine Schutt gives exquisite and provocative form to feelings and memories. Nightwork is a masterful dreamwork, revealing our lives with the startling clarity we long for. A young woman remembers, after a forbidden embrace, the exact quality of her father's skin, "pitted and stubbled under all that color." A girl recalls the strange kingdom that was her grandfather's estate, a place she came to inhabit only through betrayal. Romantic linkings are often unexpected: mother-son, father-daughter, mother-lover-daughter. In "What Have You Been Doing?" a mother teaches her son how to kiss. In "Dead Men," a woman finds herself unable to be touched by her new lover without experiencing intensely erotic recollections of the lover who is gone. The stories are sensually detailed and sometimes shocking. Hands, feet, breasts ... bodies are known, as they are known, mostly in bed. "Before the dead man, she had slept by herself with her hands to herself like a poultice." Here is an Everywoman, voiced from familiar enclosures: a house in the country, an apartment in town. The muted landscapes, too, are an Everyplace made of "wind and slashes of high blue sky in the heads of furious trees." Schutt's fearlessness, her passionate honesty, is the source for the language of these splendid stories -- night worlds, which may disturb our composure but enable us to dream while awake.

KNOPF

Described by John Ashbery as “pared down but rich, dense, fevered, exactly right and even eerily beautiful,” Christine Schutt’s prose has earned her comparisons to Emily Dickinson and Eudora Welty. In her new novel, Schutt delivers a pitch-perfect, timeless and original work on the spectacle of love. Prosperous Friends follows the evolution of a young couple’s marriage as it is challenged by the quandaries of longing and sexual self-discovery. The glamorous and gifted Ned Bourne and his pretty wife, Isabel, travel to London, New York, and Maine in hopes of realizing their artistic promise, but their quest for sexual fulfillment is less assured. Past lovers and new infatuations, doubt and indifference threaten to bankrupt the marriage. The Bournes’ fantasies for their future finally give way to a deepened and mature perspective in the company of an older, celebrated artist, Clive Harris, and his wife, Dinah, a poet. With compassionate insight, Schutt explores the divide between those like Clive and Dinah who seem to prosper in love and those like Ned and Isabel who feel themselves condemned to yearn for it.

Prosperous Friends

GROVE PRESS

Prosperous Friends proves Schutt to be one of the finest stylists alive.”Los Angeles Review of Books Artful . . . Astonishing . . . Piercingly real . . . The poetic concision and allusiveness of [Schutt’s] prose give the story more heft than a mere two-hundred pages would suggest. . . . Her sentences never waste a phrase or even a word. In these finely cut scenes . . . Schutt deals killing blows with such short, precise movements that at first you barely register the wound.”The Washington Post In her new novel, Christine Schutt, two-time winner of the O. Henry Prize for Fiction, delivers a musical, timeless, and original work on the spectacle of love. Prosperous Friends follows the evolution of a young couple’s marriage as it is challenged by the quandaries of longing and sexual self-discovery. The glamorous and gifted Ned Bourne and his pretty wife, Isabel, travel to London, New York, and Maine in hopes of realizing their artistic promise, but their quest for sexual fulfillment is less assured. Past lovers and new infatuations, noetic desires, doubt, and indifference threaten to bankrupt the marriage. The Bournes’ fantasies for their future finally give way to a deepened perspective in the company of an older, celebrated artist, Clive Harris, and his wife, Dinah, a poet. With compassionate insight, Schutt explores the divide between those like Clive and Dinah, who seem to prosper in love, and those like Ned and Isabel, who feel themselves condemned to yearn for it.

“Pure Hollywood is pure gold.”―Ottessa Moshfegh The sensational new story collection from one of our sharpest, most original, and daringly cinematic stylists, National Book Award finalist and O Henry Prize winner Christine Schutt. In one eponymous novella and ten stories, Pure Hollywood brings us into private worlds of corrupt familial love, intimacy, longing, and danger. From an alcoholic widowed actress living in desert seclusion to a young mother whose rejection of her child has terrible consequences, from a newlywed couple who ignore the violent warnings of a painter burned by love to an eerie portrait of erotic obsession, each story is an imagistic snapshot of what it means to live and learn, love and hurt. With Pure Hollywood Christine Schutt gives us sharply suspenseful and masterfully dark interior portraits of ordinary lives, infused with her signature observation and surprise. Timeless, incisive, and precise, these tales are a rush of blood to the head, portals through which we open our eyes and see the world anew.

Pure Hollywood: And Other Stories

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

Books by Schütt, Christine

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

All Souls

Florida

A Day, a Night, Another Day, Summer

All Souls

Nightwork: Stories

Nightwork: Stories

Prosperous Friends

Prosperous Friends

Pure Hollywood: And Other Stories

Pure Hollywood: And Other Stories