Kirjahaku

In her follow-up to the critically acclaimed novel The Anxiety of Everyday Objects, Aurelie Sheehan presents a moving coming-of-age story set in the disturbingly reckless and often hilariously tacky 1970s. In 1975, Alison Glass, age thirteen, moves to Connecticut with her bohemian parents and her horse, Jazz. Shy, observant, and in a back brace for scoliosis, Alison finds strength in an unlikely friendship with Kate Hamilton, the charismatic but troubled daughter of an egomaniacal New Age guru and his substance-loving wife. Seeking refuge from the chaos in their lives, the girls escape into the world of their horses. Rich in humor and heartbreak, History Lesson for Girls is an elegy to a friendship that meant everything.

Men in dinosaur suits. A Norwegian freakazoid millionaire. Cats and catharsis, somber symbols, listless lives going off the rails. Pluck, persistence, and the pursuit of happiness.In the tradition of Joyce's Dubliners, Demigods on Speedway is a portrait of a city that reflects the recession-era Southwest. Inspired by tales from Greek mythology, these gritty heroes and heroines struggle to find their place in the cosmos. Each of these linked stories develops the extremes of the modern psyche: an executive struggling to understand his wife's illness even as he compulsively cheats on her, a teenage runaway whose attraction to her ""twin"" is bound to fail, an overweight boy vicariously experiencing true love through the tales of his trainer, a car-wash attendant with outsized dreams of Hollywood.Characters with mythical-sounding names like Dagfinn and Zero plot their courses through a sky riddled with flawed constellations. Sheehan's edgy language aptly reveals her characters as they lurch toward the next day's irreverent beginning. As the characters' lives overlap, their stories carry mythology out of the past and into a very modern dilemma: the cumulative sense that here is a city with its own demigods, individuals struggling to survive under siege while passionately seeking to make something immortal in their lives.

"It takes so long to see you are a slave," muses one character in these lyrical, sometimes bitingly funny chronicles of women breaking out of imposed roles.?"Jack Kerouac Is Pregnant "chronicles the dreams of misplaced waitresses, prostitutes and other working girls, the survival techniques of secretaries too smart to take orders. Using narrative elements poetically, Sheehan subverts the notion of linear storytelling, creating kaleidoscopic stories by layering and contrasting various elements.

The sixty-eight short works in this collection (some only a paragraph, others a few pages) straddle memoir and fiction, exploring the nuances of sexuality, motherhood, love, and ambition. Like Lydia Davis, Aurelie Sheehan's stories are potent miniatures that blossom out from seemingly insignificant encounters and objects. Jewelry Box is a collection of intimate renderings of the life that surrounds us, just under the surface. Aurelie Sheehan is author of two novels, History Lesson for Girls and The Anxiety of Everyday Objects, and the story collection Jack Kerouac Is Pregnant. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Arizona in Tucson.