The Small Backs of Children by Lidia Yuknavitch

LIDIA YUKNAVITCH is the nationally bestselling author of the novels The Book of Joan, The Small Backs of Children, Dora: A Headcase, and the memoir The Chronology of Water. A book of heroic grace and empathy, Verge is a viscerally powerful and moving survey of our modern heartache life. In Verge, her first collection of short fiction, she turns her eye to life on the margins, in all its beauty and brutality. Lidia Yuknavitch's bestselling novels The Book of Joan and The Small Backs of Children, and her groundbreaking memoir, The Chronology of Water have established her as one of our most urgent contemporary voices: a writer with a rare gift for tracing the jagged boundaries between art and trauma, sex and violence, destruction and survival.

A wounded man drives eastward, through tears and grief, toward an unexpected transcendence. A brazen child tells off a pack of schoolyard tormentors with the spirited invention of an eleventh commandment. A young janitor transforms discarded objects into a fantastical, sprawling miniature city until a shocking discovery forces him to rethink his creation. And yet, as their plot unfolds, everything we know about the story comes into question: What does the writer really want? Who is controlling the action? And what will happen when these two worlds - East and West, real and virtual - collide?Ī fierce, provocative, and deeply affecting novel of both ideas and action that blends the tight construction of Julian Barnes's The Sense of an Ending with the emotional power of Anthony Marra's A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, Lidia Yuknavitch's The Small Backs of Children is a major step forward from one of our most avidly watched writers.Join us on Wednesday, February 5th, as we welcome Lidia Yuknavitch with her latest fiction, Verge.Ī fiercely empathetic group portrait of the marginalized and outcast in moments of crisis, from one of the most galvanizing voices in American fiction.Īn eight-year-old trauma victim is enlisted as an underground courier, rushing frozen organs through the alleys of Eastern Europe. As the writer plunges into a suicidal depression, her filmmaker husband enlists several friends, including a fearless, bisexual poet and an ingenuous performance artist, to save her by rescuing the unknown girl and bringing her to the United States. The image wins acclaim and prizes, becoming an icon for millions - and a subject of obsession for one writer, the photographer's best friend, who has suffered a devastating tragedy of her own. In a war-torn village in Eastern Europe, an American photographer captures a heart-stopping image: a young girl flying toward the lens, fleeing a fiery explosion that has engulfed her home and family.

The Small Backs of Children by Lidia Yuknavitch