You Have Reached Your Destination
In her award-winning collection, YOU HAVE REACHED YOUR DESTINATION, author Louise Marburg captures turning points in the lives of twelve disparate women. Marburg's crisp, clear-eyed prose, infused with dark humor, reveals the inevitable collapse of pretension beneath the struggles of loneliness, death, and the all too human need to be seen. From a pre-teen attempting to understand her father's suicide to a ninety-year-old caught in shadows of past marital abuse, each of these women is made to confront the reality that change is the only certainty. This collection, Marburg's finest yet, invites us to face ourselves and our own life journeys with sympathy, humor, and courage.
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"Marburg's characters find themselves in lives they don't quite recognize, searching for signposts that can lead them forward or tell them who they are...These characters are as quirky as they are full of heart."-The New York Times
Daphne Kalotay, in "10 award-winning short story collections worth reading" for The Washington Post, said, "Delightfully jaded wisdom buoys Louise Marburg's You Have Reached Your Destination...In Marburg's hands, even the seemingly whimsical...carries the weight of truth."
Erin McGraw, author of Joy and 52 Other Very Short Stories, said of the collection, "The spare, elegant stories in Louise Marburg's new book feature characters struggling to define themselves in a world that keeps confounding and contradicting them. Long-cherished ideas are examined and sometimes shattered, and lives are reshaped before our eyes. In Marburg's world, relationships are always subject to radical change, and her characters' destinations are unexpected, remarkable, and beautifully memorable."
Robin Black, author of Life Drawing and If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This, said, "The best short stories soar because of their author's wisdom, their knowledge of human nature, their ability to telegraph that knowledge in this odd, compressed form. Louise Marburg has that rare wisdom; her fiction absolutely hums with it, and yes, soars. This book is enlightening, challenging, and moving. I am so glad it is out in the world."
R.L. Maizes, author of Other People's Pets (winner of the Colorado Book Award) and We Love Anderson Cooper, said, "In her new collection, You Have Reached Your Destination, Louise Marburg has assembled a cast of badly behaved women I couldn't help but adore. Hilarious, irreverent, and tender hearted, her characters inspire empathy for them and compassion for ourselves. Warning: May cause addiction to Marburg's writing and sudden cravings for her other collections."
Leslie Pietrzyk, author of Admit This to No One, said, "An artful collection of stories, with vibes of Edward Hopper's New York. Exquisitely lonely, fraught with the ache of last chances, yet rendered with hope and love and humor, these stories left my heart lurching: What just flattened me? How did she do that?"
Ethel Rohan, author of In the Event of Contact, said, "You Have Reached Your Destination is a striking collection of short stories about the desires and destinations that too often elude us. What never fails, never eludes, is Marburg's affecting depiction of the strange, painful, and wondrous."
Mary South, author of You Will Never be Forgotten, said, "You Have Reached Your Destination is a brilliantly subtle and elegantly crafted collection about fractured families, primal wounds, and lost opportunities, resilience, forgiveness, and the vibrancy of solitary lives. I greatly admired Louise Marburg's portrayal of women taking care of children, parents, friends, and neighbors while taking stock of their own experiences, women on the verge of regarding themselves with new excitement and tenderness."
Rebecca Bennett, in By the Book BTX, said, "This fourth collection of shorts stories cements Marburg's place as an important and compelling voice in contemporary literature as she captures American angst and loneliness as few have done since Kurt Vonnegut, Jr."
