Overview

A stunning collection of stories exploring love and art, luck and loss, from the “invaluable” (George Saunders) author of How to Behave in a Crowd and The Material “These stories don’t close so much as continue inside you. They tilt the world and don’t set it back, leaving you to live with the shift.”—Morgan Talty, author of Fire Exit and Night of the Living Rez A young woman takes stock after the burglary of her apartment. A teenager becomes obsessed with the obituaries in a weekly magazine. Grandchildren mourn the grandparents who loved them and the grandparents who didn’t. Painters and almost-painters try to distinguish Good Art from Bad Art. People grapple with life-altering illness, unrequited love, and promises they have every intention of keeping. Some win the lottery. Others don’t. In these sinewy, thoughtful stories, celebrated New Yorker contributor Camille Bordas delves into the mysteries of life, death, and all that happens in between. At once darkly funny and poignantly self-aware, Bordas’s writing offers a window into our shared, flawed humanity without insisting on a perfect understanding of our experiences. With her first collection, which gathers previously unpublished stories alongside work originally featured in The New Yorker and The Paris Review, Bordas cements her reputation as a master of the form.

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Table of Contents

Reviews

Praise for One Sun Only “Camille Bordas writes toward the quiet pressure points—the joke with a bruise under it, the love that won’t behave, the losses that don’t end when the funeral does. The prose is exact, unshowy, funny when it hurts to be, and tender without asking for mercy. These stories don’t close so much as continue inside you. They tilt the world and don’t set it back, leaving you to live with the shift.”—Morgan Talty, author of Fire Exit and Night of the Living Rez “Bordas’s narrators share a particular sensibility—smart, mordantly funny, and sharp-eyed about contemporary life on both sides of the Atlantic—but the stories themselves never land where you might expect. I hope this is the first of many collections, because I want to be reading Bordas for the rest of my life.”—Nell Freudenberger, author of The Limits and Lucky Girls “[Bordas’s stories are] perfectly formed marvels, funny, skeptical, self-aware, and humane. I love them for their seeming lightness: there [is] clearly a super-keen intellect at work, but one keen and confident enough to express itself as simply as possible, to let itself be fully metabolized by the story, with no showy remainder.”—Adam Ehrlich Sachs, Literary Hub Praise for The Material “Brilliance is on display here.”—Percival Everett, author of James “Brimming with insecure characters, clever repartee, dark jokes and funny riffs . . . Bordas makes a case that [emotion and comedy can] coexist.”—The Wall Street Journal Praise for How to Behave in a Crowd “An utterly charming book—moving, witty, funny, and especially wonderful for the mature kind-heartedness of its view of humanity. Camille Bordas is an invaluable new voice.”—George Saunders, author of Vigil and Tenth of December “Funny, humane, and slyly philosophical.”—Zadie Smith, author of The Fraud and Grand Union

“Early in reading The Presentation on Egypt, I came across a moment of such pure narrative electricity, I knew then that I would go on to read everything else Camille Bordas had written.”—Parker Tarun, Washington Square Review “One Sun Only is one of the best new collections I’ve read in a long time, not just for lines which pack in pathos and humor, conveyed through a character whom Bordas makes lively and real, but also for the pleasant experience of reading several such pieces back-to-back. How nice to move between their carefully crafted little worlds, and to be continually surprised.”—The Telegraph “[Stories] brimming with human frailty, vulnerability, and the delicious pain of living.”—The Chicago Review “Told with sparkling energy . . . Joy, sorrow and worry bubble under the surface, and Bordas beautifully teases out these emotional truths.”—The Daily Mail “Highly recommend[ed] . . . imaginative, wry.”—The Independent “There’s bound to be something here to captivate you.”—Express “Camille Bordas writes toward the quiet pressure points—the joke with a bruise under it, the love that won’t behave, the losses that don’t end when the funeral does. The prose is exact, unshowy, funny when it hurts to be, and tender without asking for mercy. These stories don’t close so much as continue inside you. They tilt the world and don’t set it back, leaving you to live with the shift.”—Morgan Talty, author of Fire Exit and Night of the Living Rez “Bordas’s narrators share a particular sensibility—smart, mordantly funny, and sharp-eyed about contemporary life on both sides of the Atlantic—but the stories themselves never land where you might expect. I hope this is the first of many collections, because I want to be reading Bordas for the rest of my life.”—Nell Freudenberger, author of The Limits and Lucky Girls “[Bordas’s stories are] perfectly formed marvels, funny, skeptical, self-aware, and humane. I love them for their seeming lightness: there [is] clearly a super-keen intellect at work, but one keen and confident enough to express itself as simply as possible, to let itself be fully metabolized by the story, with no showy remainder.”—Literary Hub “Bordas probes her privileged characters’ existential dread in this masterful collection. . . . Distinguished by the author’s sly wit and complex understanding of the human condition, these stories leave a mark.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review “Sublime . . . With sharp humor, Bordas’ stories reveal the fragile seams in her characters’ current states while also nimbly exposing the peculiarities of human nature.”—Booklist “A dozen stories brimming with life, each as unpredictable as a chain of thoughts . . . Bordas’s stories don’t defy summary so much as they chortle at it. . . . Bordas is a master vivisectionist of inner life. . . . There’s nothing here that feels finessed or artificed. . . . Utterly delightful.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

Author Information

Camille Bordas is a novelist and short story writer. She is the author of two novels in English, The Material and How to Behave in a Crowd. Her earlier two, Partie Commune and Les Treize Desserts, were written in her native French. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and The Paris Review. She has been named a Guggenheim Fellow. Born in France, raised in Mexico City and Paris, she currently lives in Chicago.

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