Fiction Short Stories (single Author)
In Progress
Stories
- Publisher
- Hidden River Publishing
- Initial publish date
- Jun 2019
- Category
- Short Stories (single author)
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9780999491515
- Publish Date
- Jun 2019
- List Price
- $24.85
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Where to buy it
Recommended Age, Grade, and Reading Levels
- Reading age: 15 to 100
Description
In Progress, is rooted in the sad, defiant realities of womanhood in all its stages. From the innocent, barely aware teen in “The 401” to the resigned spectacle of rolls and wrinkles in “All of Me,” the narrators are women who, like their bodies, are works in progress.
Through flawless prose and natural dialogue, the stories are strong and clear, each presenting a setting and situation both new and recognizable. Authentic details evoke our times, from the nylons, French rolls and Centennial Song of childhood to today’s double-double and aqua fit classes. Each character is unique—familiar but never predictable, like the customers Ruthie thinks she knows so well in “Ruthie and the Big Blue Sky.” Here, the surprise endings are at the same time perfectly inevitable.
About the author
Awards
- Winner, The Eludia Award
Contributor Notes
Catharine Leggett's prize-winning short stories have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals in Canada and the United States, as well as online publications, and on CBC Radio. She is the winner of the Okanagan Fiction Award, and a two-time finalist in the Columbus Creative Cooperative Great Novel Contest. She is the author of a novel, The Way to Go Home (Urban Farmhouse Press, 2019). She lives in London, Ontario, Canada.
Excerpt: In Progress: Stories (by (author) Catharine Leggett)
From "All of Me":
The red dress won’t do. Too clingy. Now there’s a laugh. Clingy? She can’t get it past her boobs. It might have fit a number of sizes ago. “l think I’m going to need a bigger size,” she calls to Brittany. She honestly thought she was a sixteen, but now probably an eighteen. Maybe bigger?
“I’ve got something in a blue floral,” Brittany calls from the other side of the door. “l think it would be lovely with your coloring. It’s a cute dress.”
Her coloring? What would that be? Tired blue, verging on grey? She’s no beauty, not anymore. She’s three times the person she was when she and Nick hooked up. Anyway, she isn’t one for florals— they could either be too matronly or too girly. When was the last time she wore anything that was cute?
“Okay, I’ll give it a try.”
Editorial Reviews
The stories that make up Catharine Leggett's masterly new collection, In Progress, demonstrate the writer's ability to convey, within the confines of a single narrative, the entirety of the lives of the girls and women who make up her subjects--unlikely narrators who are, nevertheless, heartbreakingly reliable. Just as each part of a hologram contains a particular perspective of the image, it also includes the entire object. So, too, do these stories. Chronic disappointment metastasizes into a bedrock of scar tissue to found a life upon; self-sacrifice goes postal; and no one is who they seem--you may never look at the woman who tops your coffee off at the donut shop the same, or the checkout girl at the grocery store. Meticulously crafted, humane, but never sentimental, and firmly anchored in its time and place, In Progress gives the reader much to ponder and even more to savour. --Melissa Hardy, author of A Cry of Bees, Broken Road, Surface Rights, Constant Fire, The Uncharted Heart, and others