Wife with Knife

by Molly Giles

WINNER OF THE PUSHCART PRIZE    "This collection is her best ever." AMY TAN    Wife with Knife is a collection of quick and quirky short stories, that are an utter delight and winner of the Leapfrog Global Fiction Prize 2020 "Molly Giles’ stories have always been among my favorites since I first read her work thirty-seven years ago. This collection is her best ever. What an irreverent, original voice! I found myself gasping in shock and laughter, feeling at the end of each tale that I had garnered strange wisdom on the human heart and its unerring sense for finding trouble."-- Amy Tan , author of The Joy Luck Club The speakers in Molly Giles’s Wife With Knife offer their truths with surprising “[T]he actual heart looks more like a tongue than a valentine” states the grief-flayed aunt of “Agate Beach,” while the careless driver of “Accident” thinks “If I rear-ended anyone in California, I might be sued or shot but I would not be prayed upon.” Many of the stories are not traditional narratives but glimpses of the trouble or healing that lies teens refusing to heed traffic, lovers staring down death and betrayal and closure. Like a street magician’s trick, Wife With Knife holds out each everyday tragedy or quiet triumph only to replace it seamlessly with another.

Genres: Short Stories

208 pages, Paperback

Published November 16, 2021

About the author

Molly Giles’ newest collection of short stories, Wife With Knife, recently won the Leap Frog Fiction Contest and will be published in October of 2021. She has published four previous prize winning collections of stories: Rough Translations, which won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the Boston Globe Award, and the the Bay Area Book Reviewers’ Award; Creek Walk, which won the Small Press Best Fiction Award, the California Commonwealth Silver Medal for Fiction, and was a New York Times Notable Book; Bothered, which won the Split Oak Press Flash Fiction Award and All the Wrong Places, which won the Spokane Prize for Fiction. She has also published a novel, Iron Shoes, and an ebook of stories, Three for the Road. Her work has been included in numerous anthologies including the O.Henry and Pushcart Prize (twice) and she has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Marin Arts Council, and the Arkansas Arts Council.

Molly has taught fiction writing at San Francisco State University, University of Hawaii in Manoa, San Jose State University, the National University of Ireland at Galway, the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, and at numerous writing conferences, including The Community of Writers and Naropa. She has won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Book Reviewing, been awarded residences at MacDowell, Yadoo, and The House of Literature in Paros, Greece, and has edited many published writers, including Amy Tan.

Reviews

[Allison Hammond · Rating 5 out of 5]

So many of the women in this collection are in motion, and so few of them realize their trajectory heads down. Which makes it so very delicious when some of them manage to get the upper hand, in spite of themselves. Giles’ storytelling is lacerating and fast. So much wit in these stories, and so much pleasure for us cynics. Standouts include the title story along with “Accident,” “Deluded,” “Assumption,” “Life Cycle of a Tick,” and “Two Words.”

[Ethel Rohan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thought often of the thrust of Beckett's work as I read: the arbitrary cruelty of life. This collection is every bit as absurdist, brutal, brilliant, unsettling, and luminous. It's also shot through with wonderfully droll humor.

[Barbara Graham · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this brilliant story collection, Molly Giles cuts right to the bone with the eye of a surgeon and the mouth of a naughty angel. Each story is its own spicy confection, while each character and situation is rendered with such nuance and precision, I found myself laughing and gasping all at once. For lovers of literature in search of a pleasurable read, I can't recommend Wife with Knife highly enough.

[Michelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

Can't say it enough how much I adore Molly Giles' writing and witty voice. Not all of the stories in this collection are equally compelling, but she's got some excellent ones in here. My X... is a favorite from SmokeLong Quarterly! Her stories also serve as a good masterclass in short writing.

[Barbara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent collection of well written, sometimes a bit shocking stories.

[Patricia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Short stories that captivate, horrify, beguile, mystify, delight. I loved the characters and I am old enough now to identify with almost all of them. I especially enjoyed reading Assumption. Thanks, Molly.