Pins and Needles | Karen Brown
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This book is the winner of the Grace Paley Prize in short fiction. child, husband and wife, close friends, and virtual strangers. In many of these stories, Brown shows how love emerges as infidelity - incongruous and disruptive, threatening the stability of daily life. mother died years before, and begins an affair with the neighbor. The narrator of Apparitions, who has recently returned the blind grandson she was raising to the care of his mother, invites a confused young man into her home. In The Ropewalk, a bartender haunted by her abandonment of her own child aids a customer in a struggle for custody of her daughters. A pregnant teenager in Unction comes to accept the reality of her situation while working a summer job counting parts in a bookbinding machine shop. Annie, the young mother with a tragic past in Pins and Needles, leaves her infant daughter to go on an errand in a snowstorm, and picks up a boy she doesn't know. natural world. Each story moves toward the moment in which its characters, navigating loss, learn acceptance. Like the single mother in Destiny, they see their lives happen - all around, just then, forever.
Pins and Needles | 
