A Distant Town: Stories

by Jill Talbot

Unknown Binding

About the author

Jill Talbot is the author of The Last Year: Essays, Winner of the Wandering Aengus Press Editor's Award, The Way We Weren’t: A Memoir (Soft Skull) and a collection of personal essays, Loaded: Women and Addiction (Seal Press). She's the editor of Metawritings: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction (Iowa). Her writing has appeared in journals such as AGNI, Brevity, Colorado Review, Diagram, Gulf Coast, Hotel Amerika, Lit Mag, and The Rumpus. A Distant Town: Stories, winner of the 2020-2021 Jeanne Leiby Award, is available from The Florida Review Press.

Reviews

[Charles · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jill Talbot’s collection, A Distant Town, is a like driving a stolen car down a revolutionary road. Pack your bags, because this book will pick you up on the side of the highway when you’re hitchhiking, bring you in, buy you coffee, break your heart, and then, at the end, dump you at the next oasis, never to call or write to you again—but it will be worth it: Jill Talbot proves time and again that getting there is more than half the fun. It’s everything.

This is the kind of book that reminds me what literature is for. You want to read stories that leave you defenseless, take away your ability to rely on preconception, stories that won’t let you hide behind your pretensions, don’t you? If not, Talbot’s going to make you hitchhike all the way back to the status quo.

Her stories are a rarity in contemporary fiction: enlightening, provocative, raw, and beautiful. They’ll stick with you forever and always, like the cheap tattoo you got when you were drunk and stuffed with corn dogs over a three-day weekend.

Spending time with Talbot’s mottled crew of saints, shitkickers, and (book) sluts is like taking a trip back in time, to everything we’ve ever known and lost in our lives. Talbot’s wit and candor propel every sentence. Each fiction does its part (and more) to revitalize the story form itself, always questioning how we, as writers, as readers, know our characters, how we make sense out of the people that populate their, and our, fragmented lives.

By reading stories like these, and staying off of Instagram long enough to read them, we find the courage to tell more stories, to live more life. And unlike a stolen car, A Distant Town, a supremely hopeful and meticulous collection, makes a great gift.

[Diane Gottlieb · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have long been a fan of Jill Talbot's essays but with A Distant Town I've been introduced to her fiction--and I couldn't be happier! I am in awe of these stories. Inspired by the lonesome records her father used to play on his stereo, this collection sings. Each story is its own lonesome song, one more moving than the next.