Sympathetic People
By
Donna Baier Stein
Genre:
Fiction, Short Stories
BOOK DESCRIPTION
Both the beauty and frailty of
human connections are seen in the thirteen stories collected in Sympathetic
People. Here are women and men struggling to find love, meaning, happiness in
marriage, adulterous affairs, art, meditation, and even the passage from life
to death. Longing generated by loss is everywhere--in the death of a son, the
end of a marriage, the slide from hope ignited by Neil Armstrong’s moon walk to
hopelessness after President Kennedy’s death.
"Donna Baier Stein is a
discovery. Her deceptively mild story-telling veers swiftly into the savage but
often unacknowledged discontent of suburban life - wives struggling with
marital disappointment and missed opportunities, celebrating and often betrayed
by unexpected friendships - all explored with language that engages and
surprises."
- C. Michael Curtis,
Fiction Editor, The Atlantic
"Donna Baier Stein writes
with the grace and precision of a poet . . . here is a writer who
trusts not only herself, but her readers, who will be skillfully
guided into coming to their own satisfying conclusions."
--Elizabeth Berg, New York Times bestselling
author, most recently of Tapestry of Fortunes
MY REVIEW
Sympathetic
People is a wonderful collection of short stories. Stein’s writing leads
readers through various time periods and diverse lifestyles. She eloquently
depicts rites of passages that include times of love, loss, humility,
nostalgia, and more.
I applaud
the author for creating intriguing stories that allowed me to experience a
multitude of emotions within just a few pages. The characters are colorful, the
dialogue flows smoothly, and the issues will touch many.
AUTHOR INFO
Donna Baier
Stein’s writing has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, Kansas Quarterly,
New York Stories, Prairie Schooner, Washingtonian, many other journals and
anthologies from Simon & Schuster and The Spirit That Moves us Press. Her
short story collection was a Finalist in the Iowa Fiction Awards and will be
published, as Sympathetic People, in 2013 by Serving House Books. She
has received the PEN/New England Discovery Award for Fiction, a Johns Hopkins
University Writing Seminars Fellowship, Bread Loaf Scholarship, a grant from
the New Jersey Council of the Arts, prizes from the Poetry Council of Virginia,
two Pushcart nominations, and an Honorable Mention in the 2013 Allen E. Ginsberg
Poetry Awards. Her poetry chapbook Sometimes You Sense the Difference
was published in 2012 by Finishing Line Press. One of her stories was performed
by Tony-award winning actress Maryann Plunkett at Playwrights Theatre in
Madison, NJ. Donna was a Founding Editor of Bellevue Literary Review and
founded and currently publishes Tiferet: A Journal of Spiritual Literature (www.tiferetjournal.com.) She is also an award-winning copywriter. Her website is www.donnabaierstein.com.
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