Kim Magowan

In Don't Take This the Wrong Way, Magowan and Ross probe the stories we tell each other and ourselves. The characters in these 25 stories deceive and manipulate, they scrutinize and admonish, but also, they earnestly seek to draw meaning from the flotsam of their lives. Two friends mocking the needy, sancitmonious co-worker they call "the Kindness Woman, '' confront their own painful longing for someone to accept them. A woman who developed unusually acute vision during the last stages of her marriage wonders after the divorce if perhaps she'd been wrong to make so much of what she'd observed; perhaps her ex's "best qualities are visible only at a distance." Many of these characters are trying to get by with clumsy skills, limited resources, and impaired caretakers. Grown siblings recall bitterly their father's neglect when their mother died: "You hear about kids being raised by wolves, but the three of us were for a while there raised by kitchen cabinets and vacuum cleaners--nothing sentient." A girl living on a military base grapples with the terrible violence of war by playing a game she knows better than to tell her mother about. These characters enjoy burning bridges. A woman reluctantly enscripted by the self-satisfied friend she doesn't much like to be each other's "accountability buddies," gleefully learns that her friend's eight-year-old daughter has started a "Sexy Club." The characters in these stories bond over their mutual love of words, and they battle and break up over callously or sloppily chosen words. A college student living back at home for the summer begins an affair with an older coworker after noticing that he was also someone "who found language revealing, worth inspection." In some instances, wanting connection, these characters may read a lot into very few words, as when a pleasant stranger at the gym hands one narrator a towel to wipe off a sweaty exercise bike: "In that mutual exchange-'Gross, ' 'Gross, ' 'Thanks, ' which she responded to not vocally but with a commiserating nod-I felt a meeting of the minds." Through precise prose, deep affection, wry humor, and a measure of snark, Magowan and Ross invite readers to recognize how lonely, petty, yet hopeful people are, and how desperately they want to be properly understood.

"I'm enthralled by the deadpan weird found in so many of Kim Magowan's stories, where the strange doesn't so much intrude upon the real but rather insist it is the real. How Far I've Come is such a smart, moving, funny collection, by a writer who never fails to thrill and surprise me." -Matt Bell, author of Appleseed "Kim Magowan's new collection circumnavigates the tense world of fractured relationships. We're inside and outside, straddling and stomping away from divorces and affairs and threesomes with lapsed Christians. It's such an achievement, all the longing and lust stretched between two covers. I couldn't put it down." --Sherrie Flick, author of Thank Your Lucky Stars"I learn so much about writing when I read Kim Magowan. She's artful yet honest, modest yet brazen. She somehow writes stories that are at once intimate, funny, and tragic, spooling and unspooling the joys, travails, and mishaps of love and friendship and family. Under the spell of her wry wit, her wisdom, I gladly follow her exploration of the general messiness of being human, always turning the page for just one more story. Just one more." --Grant Faulkner, author of All the Comfort Sin Can Provide""Beautiful and incisive. Every piece is compelling in its own way and I love how the invention reveals itself over the course of the book. Dazzling." --Matthew Faogarty, author of Maybe Mermaids and Robots Are Lonely

The relationship between Heather Katchadourian and Julie Howe is complicated. Over the past two decades, they've been just about everything to each other: boarding school roommates, best friends, lovers, rivals, even co-parents--both together and estranged. Will they find their way back to each other, or have they inflicted too much damage along the way? Reminiscent of the work of Meg Wolitzer, and narrated by Heather, Julie, their lifelong friends, partners, and children, The Light Source is a prismatic portrayal of what everlasting modern love truly looks like and reminds us that what's meant-to-be becomes harder to define with age.

In Kim Magowan's aptly titled debut short-story collection, Undoing, characters are frequently caught with their eyes on the past, trying to discern where it all went wrong, whether that concerns a marriage that survives infidelity only to fade later into oblivion or the premature termination of an affair. A young girl hopes to make sense of her seduction by the father of the child she babysits, while a new wife surveys her youthful indiscretions for clues as to how to forge an emotional bond with her anorexic stepdaughter. Through it all, struggles become universal, perhaps inevitable. Characters often reappear: older, wiser, seeking to break the cycle of dysfunction. The ultimate effect is a feeling of community, of shared mistakes, leaving the individuals lonely but not alone. In this way, Magowan's collection moves well beyond reflection. Ignoring the wreckage of their respective pasts, her characters are willing to look ahead, to try again. Indeed, there is much pain and lasting harm to go around, but these are curious, resilient people, open to the idea that the solutions, not just the problems, lie within. They hope, despite much evidence to the contrary, that they can undo what has been done.