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Contemporary characters strive for new beginnings—or to recapture the past—in this collection of linked short stories set in San Francisco and New York.
"Endlessly fascinating characters propel these wonderfully ardent stories."— Kirkus Reviews
A coke-fueled night with a photographer costs a young woman her job in the display department of Bloomingdale’s, but holds a hidden promise. A sculptor tries to resurrect his relationship with an old flame on the same day her best friend is undergoing a bone marrow transplant. An aspiring actress drifts from house-sit to house-sit until an armed robbery at the restaurant where she works makes her question a lifelong pattern of impermanence.
Moody, elegiac, and full of longing, with ricocheting themes of desire and loss, these thirteen stories are steeped in the highs and lows inherent in the pursuit of love and creative expression.
ADVANCE PRAISE for A NEW DAY
“Sue Mell brilliantly crosses three decades of heartbreak, desire, and discovery in these sharp and nimble stories. The trio of women at the heart of A New Day are whip-smart, creative, vulnerable, determined. I would follow them anywhere.”
– Laura van den Berg, author of State of Paradise
“A beautifully mapped world, where every friendship has its betrayals and rescues, and every city is one in which ‘you were bound, eventually, to bump into everyone you’d ever slept with.’ A wonderful and clear-sighted book.”
— Joan Silber, author of The Secrets of Happiness and Improvement
“This collection beautifully captures the delicious chaos of real life, lived over decades of mingled success and disappointment, of missed connections and second chances.”
— Caitlin Horrocks, author of Life Among the Terranauts
A finalist for the St. Lawrence Book Award, Sue Mell’s story collection, A New Day, is forthcoming from She Writes Press September 3rd, 2024. Her debut novel, Provenance, won the Madville Publishing Blue Moon Novel Award, and was selected as a Great Group Read by the Women’s National Book Association, and as an Indie Fiction Pick by the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses. Her collection of micro essays, Giving Care, won the Chestnut Review Prose Chapbook Prize. Mell lives in Queens, New York, where she cares for her aging mom and a gray tuxedo cat named Poppy…read more
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