num_pages: 152
description: Winner of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction 2013.When an unwed pregnant woman is pressured to get married by her boyfriend parents and the entire culture around her she sees a feverish intensity emanating from the path to domesticity a paved path shaded by thick-trunked trees lined with trim grass and manicured mansions where miniature houses play mailboxes and animals play lawn ornaments and people play happiness.Jessica Hollanders debut collection exposes a culture that glorifies and disparages traditional domesticity where peoples confusion apathy and anxiety about the institutions of marriage and family often drive them to self-destruction.The world in Hollanders nineteen stories appears at once familiar and vividly unsettling with undercurrents of anger and violence attached to everyday objects and spaces: a pink room is a woman exploded home smells of laundered clothes and gas from the grill and the sun is so bright the sky fills with over-exposure wilting the corners to orange to red to black. Here people adopt extreme and erratic behavior: hack at furniture have affairs with high school students fantasize about sex with monsters laden flower bouquets with messages of hate; but these self-destructive acts and fantasies feel strangely like a form of growth or enlightenment or at least the only form thats available to them.As characters become girlfriends wives husbands and mothers they struggle within their roles either fighting to escape them or struggling to play them correctly but always concerned with the loss of individuality of being swallowed up by societys expectations and becoming a mother or a wife instead of remaining themselves.
language: English
title: In These Times the Home Is a Tired Place (Volume 12)
publisher: University of North Texas Press