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Pins and Needles
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Pins and Needles Hardback - 2007

by Karen Brown

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From the publisher

In Pins and Needles, Karen Brown explores love and loss between mother and 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.

In "She Fell to Her Knees," Nell inherits the neglected house in which her 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.

What remains a constant in these stories is the tangible presence of the 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.

Details

  • Title Pins and Needles
  • Author Karen Brown
  • Binding Hardback
  • Edition First Edition
  • Pages 192
  • Volumes 1
  • Language ENG
  • Publisher University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, Massachusetts, U.S.A.
  • Publication date 2007-10
  • ISBN 9781558496170 / 1558496173
  • Weight 0.81 lbs (0.37 kg)
  • Dimensions 8.64 x 5.9 x 0.9 in (21.95 x 14.99 x 2.29 cm)
  • Category Fiction - General
  • Library of Congress Catalogue Number 2007020375
  • Dewey Decimal Code FIC

About the author

Karen Brown was born in Connecticut and attended Cornell University and the University of South Florida in Tampa, where she received an MA in Creative Writing and is currently pursuing a PhD. Her stories have appeared in many literary journals, and she received an O. Henry Prize for "Unction," originally published in The Georgia Review and included in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2006. Visit her website at www.karenbrownbooks.com.

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