Overview

'Passionate, sensuous, savagely intense, and remarkable ... Moves between carnality and spirit like some franker, modernized Flannery O'Connor.' - James Wood, New York Times Sharp-edged and fearless, mixing white-hot yearning with daring humour, Jamie Quatro's debut short-story collection is a stunning and subversive portrait of modern infidelity, faith, and family. Set around Lookout Mountain on the border of Georgia and Tennessee, Quatro's hypnotically revealing stories range from the traditional to the fabulist as they expose lives torn between spirituality and sexuality in the New American South. These fifteen linked tales confront readers with dark theological complexities, fractured marriages, and mercurial temptations. Throughout the collection, a mother in her late thirties relates the various stages of her affair while other characters lay bare their own notions of God, illicit sex, raising children, and running: a wife comes home with her husband to find her lover's corpse in their bed; marathon runners on a Civil War battlefield must carry phallic statues and are punished if they choose to unload their burdens; a girl's embarrassment over attending a pool party with her quadriplegic mother turns to fierce devotion under the pitying gaze of other guests; and a husband asks his wife to show him how she would make love to another man. Sultry, acute, startlingly intimate, and enticingly cool, I Want To Show You More is the thrilling debut of an exhilarating new voice in American fiction.

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9781509859009

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Reviews

Haunting and sharp . . . [reminiscent] of the dark-meets-light style of Lydia Davis or Alice Munro-but it leaves room for zingers, too. Quatro is so good . . . the title of this debut collection isn't just a tease. * Elle * Passionate, sensuous, savagely intense, and remarkable . . . Moves between carnality and spirit like some franker, modernized Flannery O'Connor. -- James Wood * The New Yorker * [With its] impressive agility and inventiveness . . . I Want to Show You More is an obsessive first collection that feels like a fifth or sixth. It is a dogged, brutally thoughtful piece of work, and gives us a writer of great originality and apparent artistic maturity who seems to have come out of nowhere. . . . Strange, thrilling, and disarmingly honest . . . Quatro hits the right balance, giving us the closet thing I've seen in years to Donald Barthelme's insouciance, sweetness, and ominousness. . . . Provides the most engaging literary treatment of Christianity since O'Connor, without a hint of the condescension the subject often receives in contemporary fiction. . . . [Quatro's] flights of fancy are never ostentatious or arbitrary; instead they grow naturally out of the emotional and psychological states of her characters. Readers may hope to see more of this hallucinatory mode from her, but-if they're like me-they will welcome whatever they can get. -- J. Robert Lennon * The New York Times Book Review * Subtle, sexy, and reflective . . . Quatro is incisive on technology and our new varities of instant gratification. . . . Quatro's stories [have] led some to compare her work to that of Walker Percy and Flannery O'Connor. I also picked up metal-detector traces of Jayne Anne Phillips . . . and of Lorrie Moore's pulverizing wit. . . . In order to be good at big things, writes must be good at small ones. Quatro's details resonate. . . . There's so much in these stories that's shocking. Yet there's so much solace. -- Dwight Garner * The New York Times *

Author Information

Jamie Quatro is a writer of fiction, poetry, and essays. Her debut story collection, I Want To Show You More, was a shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, the Georgia Townsend Fiction Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize. She is a recipient of a 2017 Pushcart Prize. Her writing has appeared in Tin House, McSweeney's, the New York Times Book Review, and elsewhere. Quatro lives with her husband and four children in Lookout Mountain, Georgia.

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