An astonishing debut collection of sharp psychological portraits of characters trying to rebuild shattered lives
Cities I've Never Lived In
Stories
- “Arresting. . . . These are modest-seeming stories that hold deep truths, by a writer of great promise.”—The New York Times Book Review
Fearlessly riding the line between imagination and experience, fact and fiction, the linked stories in Sara Majka’s debut collection offer intimate glimpses of a young New England woman whose life must begin afresh after a divorce. Traveling the roads of Maine and the train tracks of Grand Central Station, moving from vast shorelines to the unmade beds of strangers, these fourteen stories circle the dreams of a narrator who finds herself turning to storytelling as a means of working through the world and of understanding herself. A book that upends our ideas of love and belonging, and which asks how much of ourselves we leave behind with each departure we make, Cities I’ve Never Lived In exposes, with great sadness and great humor, the ways in which we are most of all citizens of the places where we cannot stay.
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Praise
- “[Cities I've Never Lived In is] a kind of New England gothic . . . [and also] a book about an arty person with a complicated personal life. But it’s a lovely one, written in a moving and uncanny register.”—The New York Times Book Review
- “I still can’t get some of [Majka’s] perfect assessments of the human condition out of my head. . . . She’s incredibly effective.”—New York Magazine's The Cut
- “Majka’s narrator is wonderfully sympathetic. . . . With great beauty and subtlety these 14 interlinked tales speak volumes about ‘what happens when what makes life possible disappears.’”—Star Tribune (Minneapolis)
- “Graceful.”—Oprah Magazine
Acknowledgements
A Public Space Book