In These Times the Home Is a Tired Place (Volume 12)

Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction

by Jessica Hollander

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 Hollander’s debut collection exposes a culture that glorifies and disparages traditional domesticity, where people’s confusion, apathy, and anxiety about the institutions of marriage and family often drive them to self-destruction.

The world in Hollander’s 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 that’s 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 society’s expectations and becoming “a mother” or “a wife” instead of remaining themselves.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction

152 pages, Paperback

First published October 10, 2013

About the author

Jessica is the author of the short story collection In These Times the Home is a Tired Place, which won the Katherine Anne Porter Prize. She is an Assistant Professor at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. She graduated from the University of Alabama's MFA program and is originally from Ann Arbor, Michigan. She lives with her husband Richard and her children Oliver and Chloe.

Reviews

[Sean Owen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hollander's debut collection is comprised of pieces tending towards the shorter side of the short story. Some are just a single page. This is partially where this collection fails. Nothing every really lifts off or grows beyond a sketch. In several instances, especially, "The Year We Are Twenty-Three" Hollander seems to have mistaken brevity for profundity. A short line delivered at the tail end of a story that bounces off the ground a few times in its attempt to lift off feels more like an author throwing her hands up in defeat than the emotional blow she seems to intend. Hollander's attempt to incorporate elements of the fantastic or incongruous add little and in most instances further alienate the reader from the characters. With the success of George Saunders this sort of tendency towards the fantastic seems to be growing. This is an unfortunate trend. In the hands of most it just doesn't work and feels overly gimmicky. By the third story I was ready to put the book down and walk away, but with only 140 pages I figured I would just read it through. The patience paid off with the final story "Blooms Lined Up Like This." This is one of the longest pieces in the book and in the longer form Hollander's characters become fully developed and emotionally complex. This final story carries real emotional weight and if placed within a collection of other writers short story pieces would likely be a standout piece. This is Hollander's first outing and as she develops her voice I hope she explores longer fiction. It is clearly where her talent lies.

[Shoshana · Rating 4 out of 5]

I finished this book a few days ago, for my online book club. What's been interesting to me about this story collection is that I felt as though the stories weren't really separate stories but variations on a theme with archetypal characters. These characters seem to have been laid out in the title story at the center of the book, which has a strange yet cool numerical or list form to it. I'm not saying the characters correspond exactly, but close. The effect this had on me was that toward the end of the book I felt done with it before I had gotten to the end. I don't mean this in a completely negative way just that it had that effect, and I do like the overall variations on a theme idea. Looking back at this book, I doubt I'll remember much about the individual stories (except for the few that really broke traditional form) but the overall themes and archetypal characters. I don't read many short story collections, maybe one a year if that, so I haven't really encountered this before. In general, the writing style is lovely, and I love anything that critiques the idea of traditional domesticity.

[Tara · Rating 4 out of 5]

For a short book, this took me a little while to get through, because admittedly, I had to read each story twice. My brain couldn't process them the first time around. They're deceptively dense for topics so simple as day-to-day life, which makes even getting through a three-pager exhausting. Even though the central characters in each self-contained work change, you feel like you've "met" them before you even know anything about them, and you feel like you have an idea of what the author's life was like by the end. And even though there was a lot with which I couldn't identify, there were pieces which awakened certain long-dormant thoughts or memories at different stages of my life. Opens your mind a little to what a short story collection could be, and seems as though it would make a good supplemental text to any creative writing course.

[Darya · Rating 5 out of 5]

read it on the plane. strange. very sad. i enjoyed it

[Tommy Dean · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some of the stories were quite good, especially if you like quirky characters that act in unusual ways. Some of the characters were a bit too unbelievable at times. It's worth a read if you like short fiction with a punch of truth given in surprising ways.

[Garrett Peace · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rating: 3.5