Red Car — Sallie Bingham

A dozen “vibrant . . . strikingly perceptive” stories about love -- romantic, familial, comedic, and tragic, by the celebrated novelist and playwright (Booklist).

Crossing a range of landscapes and eras, spanning age and gender, and circling taboos with a sly wit, “these 12 luminous stories . . . feature narrators who find mature, often solitary forms of reckoning, and even happiness. There is not a false note in Bingham's striking collection” (Publishers Weekly).

In “A Gift for Burning” a woman regrets wasting all her energy on getting married, getting unmarried, and getting married again; “That Winter” introduces us to a woman writer in a Colorado cabin, isolated by the brutal weather, and liberated by a mysterious guest; in “Sagesse,” an American family gets a startling awakening while vacationing on the beaches of Normandy after World War II; the fearsome and tiring demands of matrimony are exposed in “Porn”; “Sweet Peas” exquisitely seizes on one single precious moment that destroys a couple's budding romance; and in the title story, the eponymous ‘65 Pontiac comes to symbolize the inevitable end of a marriage.

Praised for her “skillfully suggestive amalgam of Katherine Mansfield and Eudora Welty . . . and their “unblinking gaze”, Red Car is Sallie Bingham at her masterful best (The New York Times Book Review).