Out of the Girls Room and into the Night (Iowa Short Fiction Award)
by By Nissen, Thisbe
Category: Fiction , Short Stories (single author)

Out of the Girls' Room and into the Night is a spirited,  offbeat collection of stories, elongated riffs on that thing we call  …love. All manner of love stories: thwarted love stories, imaginary love  stories, love stories offhand and obsessive, philosophical love  stories, erudite and amusing love stories.“People don't meet because they both like Burmese food,” says  one character, “or because someone's sister has a friend who's single  and new in town, or because Billy's nose happened to crook just slightly  to the left at an angle that made me want to weep…People don't fall in  love with each other …they just fall into love.”Everyone does it: women of fierce independence, men of thin  character, rambling Deadheads, gay teenage girls, despondent Peace Corps  volunteers, anorexic Broadway theatre dancers, the eager, the grieving,  the uncommunicative. Even the confused do it. And they don't just fall  in love with each other—they fall in love with certain moments and  familiar places, with things as ephemeral as gestures and as evanescent  as sunlight.Quirky, real, idealistic, deluded, bohemian, and true, these  are people who can—and often do—fall in love with a pair of ears, August  afternoons, saucers of vitamins, New Age carpenters, and dead  bumblebees. And if there's something they can teach us, it's how to  conceive of alternative worlds and the terror and the exhilaration of  venturing outside the confines of the lives we know and making our way  into a dark, glittering unknown.