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A Good Day for Seppuku: Stories
Haunting new stories about girls on the brink of adulthood, women on the verge of breakdowns, and families undone by past deceptions.
"Kate Braverman is a writer of astonishing versatility and lyricism. Her stories are brilliantly rendered, painfully intimate portraits of individuals who come alive on the page as if illuminated by strobe lighting. With remarkable precision she tracks the restless motions of a mind searching for its reflection in the world—a continuous interrogation of the self that sweeps us along with it, as in a mysterious adventure." —Joyce Carol Oates "If fame did not find Braverman when the moment was right, perhaps it will make amends now that the moment is wrong. . . . Braverman excels at flooding readers in images that throb with menace or pleasure, as if descriptive language were a vein into which our most primal fears and desires could be injected." —Katy Waldman, The New Yorker "The book feels timeless, think Transparent , sans the trans . . . Kate Braverman, an underground literary icon through decades of razor-sharp writing, returns with a gorgeously observed collection of stories about contemporary Jewish identity. It's profound, realistic, and funny in equal measure."— David Canfield, Entertainment Weekly "Braverman daringly, ravishingly, and resoundingly dramatizes the profound consequences of delusions, lies, ignorance, anger, cruelty, poverty, disappointment, conformity, inebriation, and violence with high imagination, sensual precision, cutting humor, and bracing insight."— Donna Seaman, Booklist *Starred review "Braverman writes forthright but beautiful sentences. Her details are so vivid that they feel like memories . . . " — Publishers Weekly , *Starred/Boxed review "Kate Braverman is an original. Reading her is like hitching a ride on a runaway train, always dangerous, always thrilling, always a knockout. Seppuku is all that and more." —Frederick Barthelme, author of There Must Be Some Mistake "Braverman is the godmother of literary bad girls and a connoisseur of the shattered beauty glittering in the wreckage of her characters' lives. A Good Day for Seppuku celebrates the Braverman vision, and frames her legacy." — Janet Fitch, author of The Revolution of Marina M. A thirteen-year-old girl must choose between her mother in Beverly Hills or her pot-growing father in the Allegheny Mountains. Dr. Bernie Roth and his wife Chloe reside in a grand hacienda in La Jolla. Their children are in college, and their disappointments are profound. But Bernie has his doctor's bag of elixirs for the regrets of late middle age. Mrs. Barbara Stein, a high school teacher, looks like she'd sacrifice her life for Emily Dickinson's honor. That's camouflage. Mrs. Stein actually spends summers in the Sisyphean search for her prostitute daughter in Los Angeles. These are some of the tales told in Kate Braverman's audacious new story collection. These furious and often hilarious tableaus of American family life remind us of why she has been seducing readers ever since her debut novel Lithium for Medea shook the literary world nearly forty years ago.
"Kate Braverman is a writer of astonishing versatility and lyricism. Her stories are brilliantly rendered, painfully intimate portraits of individuals who come alive on the page as if illuminated by strobe lighting. With remarkable precision she tracks the restless motions of a mind searching for its reflection in the world—a continuous interrogation of the self that sweeps us along with it, as in a mysterious adventure." —Joyce Carol Oates "If fame did not find Braverman when the moment was right, perhaps it will make amends now that the moment is wrong. . . . Braverman excels at flooding readers in images that throb with menace or pleasure, as if descriptive language were a vein into which our most primal fears and desires could be injected." —Katy Waldman, The New Yorker "The book feels timeless, think Transparent , sans the trans . . . Kate Braverman, an underground literary icon through decades of razor-sharp writing, returns with a gorgeously observed collection of stories about contemporary Jewish identity. It's profound, realistic, and funny in equal measure."— David Canfield, Entertainment Weekly "Braverman daringly, ravishingly, and resoundingly dramatizes the profound consequences of delusions, lies, ignorance, anger, cruelty, poverty, disappointment, conformity, inebriation, and violence with high imagination, sensual precision, cutting humor, and bracing insight."— Donna Seaman, Booklist *Starred review "Braverman writes forthright but beautiful sentences. Her details are so vivid that they feel like memories . . . " — Publishers Weekly , *Starred/Boxed review "Kate Braverman is an original. Reading her is like hitching a ride on a runaway train, always dangerous, always thrilling, always a knockout. Seppuku is all that and more." —Frederick Barthelme, author of There Must Be Some Mistake "Braverman is the godmother of literary bad girls and a connoisseur of the shattered beauty glittering in the wreckage of her characters' lives. A Good Day for Seppuku celebrates the Braverman vision, and frames her legacy." — Janet Fitch, author of The Revolution of Marina M. A thirteen-year-old girl must choose between her mother in Beverly Hills or her pot-growing father in the Allegheny Mountains. Dr. Bernie Roth and his wife Chloe reside in a grand hacienda in La Jolla. Their children are in college, and their disappointments are profound. But Bernie has his doctor's bag of elixirs for the regrets of late middle age. Mrs. Barbara Stein, a high school teacher, looks like she'd sacrifice her life for Emily Dickinson's honor. That's camouflage. Mrs. Stein actually spends summers in the Sisyphean search for her prostitute daughter in Los Angeles. These are some of the tales told in Kate Braverman's audacious new story collection. These furious and often hilarious tableaus of American family life remind us of why she has been seducing readers ever since her debut novel Lithium for Medea shook the literary world nearly forty years ago.
192 pages, Paperback
First published February 13, 2018
19 people are currently reading
207 people want to read
About the author
Kate Braverman
33 books84 followersKate Braverman (born 1950) was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet, originally from Los Angeles, California, who has garnered great acclaim for works including the novels Lithium for Medea (1979), Palm Latitudes (1988), Wonders of the West (1993), and The Incantation of Frida K (2001). Her most significant work has been in stylistic hybrid forms built upon poems and rendered as short stories. She has published two books of short stories, "Squandering the Blue" (1990) and "Small Craft Warnings" (1997). She has also published four books of poetry. She has won three Best American Short Stories awards, an O. Henry Award, Carver Short Story Award, as well as the Economist Prize and an Isherwood Fellowship. She was also the first recipient of Graywolf Press Creative Nonfiction Award for Frantic Transmissions to and from Los Angeles: An Accidental Memoir, published February 2006.
Braverman has a BA in Anthropology from UC Berkeley and an MA in English from Sonoma State University. She was a founding member of the Venice Poetry Workshop, Professor of Creative Writing at CSULA, staff faculty of the UCLA Writer's Program and taught privately a workshop which included Janet Fitch, Cristina Garcia and Donald Rawley. She lived in San Francisco.
Braverman has a BA in Anthropology from UC Berkeley and an MA in English from Sonoma State University. She was a founding member of the Venice Poetry Workshop, Professor of Creative Writing at CSULA, staff faculty of the UCLA Writer's Program and taught privately a workshop which included Janet Fitch, Cristina Garcia and Donald Rawley. She lived in San Francisco.
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Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
May 23, 2018
Kate Braverman's character development is beautiful, even if her story structure seems a bit repetitive. All of these stories end with slightly labored morals. What truly bugs me is that her publisher didn't see fit to hire a decent proofreader. This book is riddled with glaring errors - characters are pealing fruit. Seriously, City Lights Books, hire a good proofreader.
November 10, 2020
A strong start but a weak finish, this collection of short stories concerns life in the US for a bunch of people - some interlinked, some not
A coming of age story about divorce, airports and Summer camp. A story of job loss and life realignment, returning to Native American roots and finding an estranged mother. High stakes divorce, drug use and misery in Manitoba.
Repetitive in the last couple of stories.
I could not get through the one about the cantankerous Professor, at all. The namesake story was probably the least interesting of the collection
Braverman has a very distinct writing style, once experienced not really necessary to repeat
A coming of age story about divorce, airports and Summer camp. A story of job loss and life realignment, returning to Native American roots and finding an estranged mother. High stakes divorce, drug use and misery in Manitoba.
Repetitive in the last couple of stories.
I could not get through the one about the cantankerous Professor, at all. The namesake story was probably the least interesting of the collection
Braverman has a very distinct writing style, once experienced not really necessary to repeat
June 8, 2023
I started on a down note, went up, but then ended down again with this collection. Meh.
Braverman is a writer with too much of an agenda for me; it’s the type of agenda that claims it’s not an agenda because it’s not about the talking points of the millennial/generation z left. In fact, it’s odd insistence at appropriation (how many WASPs randomly talk of “seppuku”?) and meandering, plotless cynicism, I’d argue, does not put story first.
The first story, “O’Hare,” is especially pompous and egregious, where a 13-year-old narrator who definitely does not read as 13, goes to stereotypically shallow Jewish summer camp, debates which estranged parent she wants to live with, and then we get random snippets of these caricatures. Maybe I’m harsh on the author's characterization. I’m probably more forgiving of the eccentricities—the mother who disappears and the father who insists his son call him “Captain”—in the final story, which is the title of the book. There was more of an arc and flow at play here; the ruminations felt more earned.
But it was juxtaposed against the previous story, “The Professor’s Wife,” which pinballed all over the place about this professor’s overwrought relationships with his wife, colleagues, yadda yadda. He appeared briefly as a bit character in the last story, where I was thrilled to learn, along with the protagonist, that he’d he moving away. :P
Braverman is the type of literary writer where the language can be beautiful, the interiority nuanced or challenging, but then she leaves it in the oven too long. Not sure if that’s the point. Lauren Friedlander wrote a compelling review on full-stop.net where she says the stories here “are more like partially-remembered dreams: when your subconscious tries to focus on the dream image, it shifts in flux, new contexts, new faculties drifting it further from what you thought it was.” https://www.full-stop.net/2018/05/31/...
She goes on to say, “[Braverman's] pessimism is ultimately unhelpful, uninsightful, and uninteresting in the contemporary landscape of fiction she so scorns.” But personally, I do think there were a couple of moments of acuity in the darkness.
My favorite two stories were in the middle. “Feeding in a Famine” is about a woman who feels compelled to return to her family’s farm every year, even though she no longer belongs and in fact faces hostility. “Cocktail Hour” details a marriage, and a broader life, that has fallen into ennui, with a jarring ending involving how addiction keeps people in their loops. In the first story, part of the hostility for the main character comes from the fact that she’s involved with a Jew; in the second, the characters come off as stereotypical rich, assimilated Jews. Judaism does factor into most of these stories; I first heard about this collection on the Jewish Book Council website, where reviewer Michelle Zaurov, wrote that the author “force[s] the reader to recognize the realities and emotions that often go unnoticed, or simply suppressed.” https://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/boo...
Meh. Definitely more of a mixed bag, imho. Friedlander’s metaphor about these stories holds more truth for me: “like darts into jello.”
Braverman is a writer with too much of an agenda for me; it’s the type of agenda that claims it’s not an agenda because it’s not about the talking points of the millennial/generation z left. In fact, it’s odd insistence at appropriation (how many WASPs randomly talk of “seppuku”?) and meandering, plotless cynicism, I’d argue, does not put story first.
The first story, “O’Hare,” is especially pompous and egregious, where a 13-year-old narrator who definitely does not read as 13, goes to stereotypically shallow Jewish summer camp, debates which estranged parent she wants to live with, and then we get random snippets of these caricatures. Maybe I’m harsh on the author's characterization. I’m probably more forgiving of the eccentricities—the mother who disappears and the father who insists his son call him “Captain”—in the final story, which is the title of the book. There was more of an arc and flow at play here; the ruminations felt more earned.
But it was juxtaposed against the previous story, “The Professor’s Wife,” which pinballed all over the place about this professor’s overwrought relationships with his wife, colleagues, yadda yadda. He appeared briefly as a bit character in the last story, where I was thrilled to learn, along with the protagonist, that he’d he moving away. :P
Braverman is the type of literary writer where the language can be beautiful, the interiority nuanced or challenging, but then she leaves it in the oven too long. Not sure if that’s the point. Lauren Friedlander wrote a compelling review on full-stop.net where she says the stories here “are more like partially-remembered dreams: when your subconscious tries to focus on the dream image, it shifts in flux, new contexts, new faculties drifting it further from what you thought it was.” https://www.full-stop.net/2018/05/31/...
She goes on to say, “[Braverman's] pessimism is ultimately unhelpful, uninsightful, and uninteresting in the contemporary landscape of fiction she so scorns.” But personally, I do think there were a couple of moments of acuity in the darkness.
My favorite two stories were in the middle. “Feeding in a Famine” is about a woman who feels compelled to return to her family’s farm every year, even though she no longer belongs and in fact faces hostility. “Cocktail Hour” details a marriage, and a broader life, that has fallen into ennui, with a jarring ending involving how addiction keeps people in their loops. In the first story, part of the hostility for the main character comes from the fact that she’s involved with a Jew; in the second, the characters come off as stereotypical rich, assimilated Jews. Judaism does factor into most of these stories; I first heard about this collection on the Jewish Book Council website, where reviewer Michelle Zaurov, wrote that the author “force[s] the reader to recognize the realities and emotions that often go unnoticed, or simply suppressed.” https://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/boo...
Meh. Definitely more of a mixed bag, imho. Friedlander’s metaphor about these stories holds more truth for me: “like darts into jello.”
July 17, 2018
I felt bored while reading these stories. I appreciate that Braverman does not waste time with the "manly hands" and the "steely look in her eyes". Yet, the descriptions are rather close to the work of a cop making a report.
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November 1, 2019Kate Braverman is like Joan Didion after she’s gotten fucked up and decided to roll down a hill. I liked the first story quite a lot - after that, I had trouble keeping up with the breakneck pace.
April 7, 2018
Tough to pin a rating to this collection. For me, the best of these stories are electrifying, inimitable. Braverman's amazing sentences propel the stories to their conclusions, and her startling images bring about thematic coherence, even though there's little structure or plot. But, the weaker stories don't hold together; reading them was painful. I wished for a hard-hearted editor to take them and forcefully mould them into shape.
September 8, 2020
Each story strongly interweaves and provokes the inevitable in human tragedy of loss, betrayal and malevolence. The gut-wrenching evocative images and scenes are indicative of seppuku in figurative form yet the endings of each story, leaves you feeling the literal sense of the act. A powerhouse of immoral self-revelation, yet deeply poetic in translation. Kind of like savoring a succulent piece of mango or absorbing the natural elements of the mountains. The words, although morbidly set, flutter across the page with grace. What a tour de force Braverman left us with....
I will add this one to my pile of books by her and cherish it as the rest.
I will add this one to my pile of books by her and cherish it as the rest.
May 8, 2023
One of my favorite collections of all time. This is Braverman's final crowning achievement in a long line of masterworks. She just leaves it all out on the field in that final titular story. Reminds one of the second half of Abbey Road, completely flying by intuition and has no fucks left to give. Quite an insight into her life, especially the final years, if you can read between the lines. And laugh-out-loud funny at times. This is take-no-prisoners poetic writing. No one even comes close.
April 22, 2018
The characters in this collection are estranged and adrift. The tone is at once dark and hyper-saturated; there is a certain sensory hyper-attunement in the language, as if the characters are moving through the world with no protective layer. Full of sharp edges and surprises, this is the kind of writing that makes me want to write.
June 1, 2018
I really enjoyed how the stories were some how related, but not related to each other. There were common elements throughout the whole book even though the stories themselves had different characters every time. It's definitely a book I'm going to want to read several times if I ever want to get everything out of the book.
September 3, 2018
Kate Braverman's short stories read like extended poems. Her language is dense, imaginative, surprising, and brilliant. I loved immersing myself in the worlds of her characters, and felt a slight sense of de ja vu while reading. Excellent.
April 4, 2019
I’ll acknowledge that there is an element of repetition and for sure, the other review mentioning the need for better proofreading is 100% correct.
However, I absolutely LOVED this book. Incredible writing. By far the most highlights I put in a book so far.
However, I absolutely LOVED this book. Incredible writing. By far the most highlights I put in a book so far.
March 15, 2020
Collection of short stories. Many but not all are set in the same small Pennsylvania town and all treat some aspect of dysfunctional families. The writing style blew me away; it was quite stunning. I could visualize each very easily. Plots were minimal.
April 10, 2018
Here's my review: http://wtpcentral.thewoventalepress.n...
April 15, 2018
Take up thy bananafish and stalk the brokenlands with veteran other-coastal denizen Braverman. She knows these parts.
September 26, 2018
Brilliant!
July 22, 2024
Absolutely serious question: was this book edited at all
There’s “errors will get by multiple trained copyeditors because that’s just the nature of the job” …and then there’s countless instances of misspellings, odd capitalizations, periods missing from ends of sentences, and even a triangle into numbers in the middle of a word
There’s “errors will get by multiple trained copyeditors because that’s just the nature of the job” …and then there’s countless instances of misspellings, odd capitalizations, periods missing from ends of sentences, and even a triangle into numbers in the middle of a word
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March 21, 2018Kate Braverman’s latest story collection, A Good Day For Seppuku, out now from City Lights, offers eight precisely written stories examining the commonplace struggles of modern upper-middle class life. Divorce, substance abuse, and social expectation plagues an assorted cast with narratives that develop slowly, in careful and considerate ways that often uncover their sadness or loneliness.
Read the rest of the review over at the Rumpus
http://therumpus.net/2018/03/a-good-d...
Read the rest of the review over at the Rumpus
http://therumpus.net/2018/03/a-good-d...
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews