GIRLS // NICOLE LOUISE REID
Book Description
Whom can a girl trust these days? Not a best friend, not a non-friend, maybe a boy who likes her and if not this one, will the next one do? GIRLS strikes a chord in the tune of lonely hearts: as an eight year old comes to see just how similar she is to an outcast and flirts with the line past which she herself will be relegated to total obscurity; and a fourteen year old wears her father’s girlfriend’s panties while flirting with just about everything, perfecting the insouciant tease.
The stories in this chapbook paint girlhood magenta and mauve. Like a three-day old bruise, Elizabeth and Agnes will mark your skin and ache there for a very long time.
About the Author
Nicole Louise Reid is the author of the novel In the Breeze of Passing Things (MacAdam/Cage). Her stories have appeared in The Southern Review, Quarterly West, Meridian, Black Warrior Review, Confrontation, turnrow, Crab Orchard Review, and Grain Magazine. She is recipient of the Willamette Award in Fiction, and has placed in Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Awards, Press 53 Open Awards, Pirate’s Alley William Faulkner Short Story Competition, the F. Scott Fitzgerald Literary Society, and Glimmer Train. She teaches creative writing at the University of Southern Indiana, where she is fiction editor of Southern Indiana Review and directs the RopeWalk Visiting Writers Reading Series.
Whom can a girl trust these days? Not a best friend, not a non-
About the Author
Nicole Louise Reid is the author of the novel In the Breeze of Passing Things (MacAdam/Cage). Her stories have appeared in The Southern Review, Quarterly West, Meridian, Black Warrior Review, Confrontation, turnrow, Crab Orchard Review, and Grain Magazine. She is recipient of the Willamette Award in Fiction, and has placed in Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Awards, Press 53 Open Awards, Pirate’s Alley William Faulkner Short Story Competition, the F. Scott Fitzgerald Literary Society, and Glimmer Train. She teaches creative writing at the University of Southern Indiana, where she is fiction editor of Southern Indiana Review and directs the RopeWalk Visiting Writers Reading Series.
Praise for Girls
“Lordy, what wonderfully creepy stories these are. Nicole Louise Reid is a witchy writer, unafraid of the desires and fears that animate our doomed kind. She embraces shame and the transgressive, the untoward and lies we beguile ourselves with. GIRLS is the richest sort of reading.”
–Lee K. Abbott, author of All Things, All at Once
“Nicole Louise Reid writes about girlhood with a vision so chilling and exact, so lacking in familiar sentimentality, that you won’t soon forget these dark stories. This is a world in which a teenager learns the art of seduction from her own philandering father. What could be more powerful, more universal—more adult—than that?”
–Holly Goddard Jones, author of Girl Trouble
“I grew up reading Flaubert and Tolstoy on the subject of the secret lives of women and young girls. Now kids, boys and girls, men and women, can grow up reading Nicole Louise Reid. Her fine stories will have that good effect on them.”
–Alan Cheuse, National Public Radio’s “Voice of Books”
“Nicole Louise Reid writes about girlhood—that time of shifting identities and the urgent desire to belong, to be someone else, to cross the border between the adolescent and the adult worlds—with charm and verve and wisdom. In “Someone Like Me,” a young girl tests the boundaries of trust, friendship, and forgiveness. In “Glimpses of Underthings,” a teenage girl tries on her newfound sexual identity in the midst of her father’s attraction to exotic women. The stories in Girls are exquisitely crafted. Anyone who cares about fine storytelling will find them a delight to read.
–Lee Martin, author of The Bright Forever
“Lordy, what wonderfully creepy stories these are. Nicole Louise Reid is a witchy writer, unafraid of the desires and fears that animate our doomed kind. She embraces shame and the transgressive, the untoward and lies we beguile ourselves with. GIRLS is the richest sort of reading.”
–Lee K. Abbott, author of All Things, All at Once
“Nicole Louise Reid writes about girlhood with a vision so chilling and exact, so lacking in familiar sentimentality, that you won’t soon forget these dark stories. This is a world in which a teenager learns the art of seduction from her own philandering father. What could be more powerful, more universal—more adult—than that?”
–Holly Goddard Jones, author of Girl Trouble
“I grew up reading Flaubert and Tolstoy on the subject of the secret lives of women and young girls. Now kids, boys and girls, men and women, can grow up reading Nicole Louise Reid. Her fine stories will have that good effect on them.”
–Alan Cheuse, National Public Radio’s “Voice of Books”
“Nicole Louise Reid writes about girlhood—that time of shifting identities and the urgent desire to belong, to be someone else, to cross the border between the adolescent and the adult worlds—with charm and verve and wisdom. In “Someone Like Me,” a young girl tests the boundaries of trust, friendship, and forgiveness. In “Glimpses of Underthings,” a teenage girl tries on her newfound sexual identity in the midst of her father’s attraction to exotic women. The stories in Girls are exquisitely crafted. Anyone who cares about fine storytelling will find them a delight to read.
–Lee Martin, author of The Bright Forever
OUT OF PRINT
