Sad Grownups
For those who've been sad and tried not to be, seventeen stories about the absurdity of searching for joy in a dying world.
A neighborhood of picturesque content-creation houses perched on too-green lawns in a California desert; a meandering stampede of unleashed dogs on the streets of San Francisco; a skein of snow geese alighting in a state park in Missouri; an uncanny fundraising auction at an upscale suburban-DC prep school. Inhabiting these worlds of disconnection and dislocation are the "sad grownups" a middle-aged queer couple arguing over whether to have children, a college professor dying from cancer, two recent high school graduates plotting a robbery, a sixty-year-old counselor at a boys' summer camp sheltering herself from the realities of life-all connected more closely to the landscapes around them than to other people, searching fervently for liberation, understanding, and even happiness, wherever and however they might be found.
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"If emotions had geographical locations, then Amy Stuber's deeply moving short story collection Sad Grownups took me to those places, but in no way was it like riding a Greyhound bus, hitting each city, each emotion, one at a time. Each story took me to the joyfully complex, lovingly hated yet adored world as it is today, and did so with some of the funniest and saddest characters I've read in quite some time. Reading these stories, I lost myself, and when I put the book down, I found myself anew. Sad Grownups is a remarkable debut story collection by a writer who I already want more from."
-Morgan Talty, bestselling author of Night of the Living Rez and Fire Exit: A Novel
"The stories in Sad Grownups are masterful. They feel both contemporary and timeless and engage American life today in ways that are at turns funny, insightful, and wise. I couldn't stop reading."
-Cara Blue Adams, author of You Never Get It Back
"Wise, inventive, and funny, Sad Grownups is also an incisive collective portrait of contemporary Americans: each story distinctly and decidedly itself, gathered together into a sometimes delightful, sometimes sobering snapshot of what it is to be alive today. In the tradition of Amy Hempel and Lorrie Moore, Amy Stuber is as sharp as she is tender, a delight to read."
-Kate Doyle, author of I Meant It Once
"These seventeen varied and remarkable stories often start with a curious premise, but open into complex, believable worlds, with rich characterization. Smart, funny, spooky and melancholy, Sad Grownups is full of unique gems that come together into a rewarding whole."
-Dan Chaon, author of Stay Awake
"Stories that hold the grief of the whole world but also the imaginative exultation of trying to live in it. Stuber writes sentences that are in a class of their own-flexible enough to twist from heartbreak into hilarity, full of observations so precise they leave you gasping. Sad Grownups is a brilliant collection."
-Clare Beams, author of The Garden and The Illness Lesson
"Amy Stuber's stories are about your neighbors and friends, the people you think you know, and what they are all hiding from you: the truth, which is that we are children and will remain so, that we are performing and we don't know it. Stuber's characters fumble through adulthood, they endure the confusing mysteries of growing up, they try to connect and instead create disasters. Sad Grownups marks the arrival of an erudite, controlled, and generous voice from the heart of America."
-Richard Mirabella, author of
Brother & Sister Enter the Forest
