Danielle Lazarin - Back Talk

Praise for Danielle Lazarins

Back Talk

Danielle Lazarins Back Talk is deceptively quiet but packs a powerful punchmuch like the girls and women in its pages. The stories in this collection batter at the boundaries of female desirenot just for sex, but for intimacy, for visibility, for agency. They talk back to the idea that stories about women are domestic, burrowing deep to find wildness and a smoldering fury beneath. The best collection Ive read in years, from a phenomenal new talent.

Celeste Ng, New York Times bestselling author of Little Fires Everywhere and Everything I Never Told You

The stories in Back Talk are not only fierce and unflinching in their clear-eyed portrayal of women and girls, they are also tender and compassionate, imbued with a deep longing; Lazarins characters ache for their lives to be without pain. Lazarin is a sophisticated writer, and her remarkable debut offers us subtle but profound truths about growing up, moving forward, and finding ourselves.

Edan Lepucki, New York Times bestselling author of Woman No. 17 and California

These are wonderful storiessparkling, witty, and tender, riding that sweet spot between urbane and vulnerable, between hilarity and heartbreak, all those impossible contradictions that remind us of what love is like. Lazarins astonishing insight and craftsmanship put me in mind of short-story masters like Ann Beattie and Charles Baxter. I think shes destined for the big leagues.

Dan Chaon, New York Times bestselling author of Ill Will

Back Talk offers a kaleidoscopic portrait of the contemporary family in a state of creative destruction, flying apart and simultaneously reconstituting itself in new forms. Danielle Lazarin guides us through the varied permutations of her extended, blended families with insightful wit, surpassing empathy, and wry wisdom.

Peter Ho Davies, author of The Fortunes

Misfits and mess-ups, dreamers and delinquents, kids chafing at adolescence and adults failing at parenthoodits easy to see yourself in Danielle Lazarins characters. But these stories, like all good stories, arent a mirror: theyre a window that shows us the whole world.

Rumaan Alam, author of Rich and Pretty

I absolutely loved this bookfrom the first page to the last, this collection is stunning for its insight into the lives of young women, revelatory for its finely tuned prose, and unforgettable for its humor and tenderness. I will return to these stories again and again. I envy the reader who gets to discover Danielle Lazarins work.

Julie Buntin, author of Marlena

Smart, sharp, well-paced storiesworlds of their own that circle life and loss with humor, wit, and sparkling intelligence.

Megan Mayhew Bergman, author of Birds of a Lesser Paradise and Almost Famous Women

Thank God, a collection of stories about women who dont hate themselves, dont hate other women, dont hate their bodies, dont hate their husbands, or even their ex-husbands, dont hate their sisters, their mothers, their fathers, their children. Women who sometimes choose to have sex and sometimes choose not to. Women who are simply, like me, trying to figure out what it means to be alive, to be in love, to be daughters, parents, siblings, wives, citizens, human beings. I hope Danielle Lazarin writes a million more stories like the ones in Back Talk so I can keep reading her work forever.

Eileen Pollack, author of A Perfect Life

PENGUIN BOOKS

BACK TALK

Danielle Lazarins short stories have won grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance, the Glimmer Train Family Matters Award, and Hopwood Awards. She is a graduate of the writing programs at Oberlin College and the University of Michigans Helen Zell Writers Program. She lives in her native New York City with her husband and daughters.

PENGUIN BOOKS

An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

375 Hudson Street

New York, New York 10014

penguin.com

Copyright 2018 by Danielle Lazarin

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

Appetite first appeared in Colorado Review; Spider Legs in Glimmer Train; Window Guards (as Ghost Dog) in People Holding; The Holographic Soul in Michigan Quarterly Review; Landscape No. 27 in Indiana Review; Back Talk in Copper Nickel; Dinosaurs in Five Chapters; and Gone in Boston Review.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING- IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Lazarin, Danielle, author.

Title: Back talk : stories / Danielle Lazarin.

Description: New York : Penguin Books, [2018]

Identifiers: LCCN 2017013074 (print) | LCCN 2017028206 (ebook) | ISBN 9781524705190 (ebook) | ISBN 9780143131472 (softcover)

Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Short Stories (single author). | FICTION / Contemporary Women. | FICTION / Literary.

Classification: LCC PS3612.A974 (ebook) | LCC PS3612.A974 A6 2018 (print) |

DDC 813/.6dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017013074

These selections are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Cover design: Lynn Buckley

Version_1

For my parents

It was different for a girl.

Susan Minot, Lust