Sing to It

by Amy Hempel

Genres: General Fiction; Literary Fiction; Short Stories

Synopsis

From award-winning author Amy Hempel, one of the most celebrated and original voices in American short fiction: a stellar new story collection — her first in more than a decade — about people finding meaning and connection in the idiosyncratic lives they lead.

Amy Hempel has a stunning reputation as one of the most important voices of contemporary American short fiction. She is a winner of multiple awards, the recipient of broad acclaim, and her Collected Stories, which compiled her four previous collections, is widely considered essential reading among writers, students, and readers of great fiction. This new collection, her first in more than a decade, is a veritable publishing event.

In these exquisitely honed and consistently surprising stories, where every sentence sings, Amy Hempel takes listeners inside the surpassing trials of daily life. In “A Full-Service Shelter”, a volunteer at a dog shelter in Spanish Harlem works tirelessly and passionately to deliver care to dogs who are on a list to be euthanized the next morning. In “Greed”, a spurned wife investigates her husband’s affair with a glamorous, older married woman. And in “Cloudland”, the longest story in the collection, a woman reckons with the choice she made as a teenager to give up her baby for adoption after discovering the true story of what went on in a maternity home nearby decades earlier.

Woven throughout this collection are Hempel’s bracing truths and her ability to paint moments that are ordinary, devastating, and deeply human. Sing to It is a dazzling, unmissable collection from a quintessential American writer.

Release date: November 12, 2019

Publisher: Scribner

Print pages: 160

Sample

Sing to It

Sing to It