American Grief in Four Stages: Stories - Paperback

by Sadie Hoagland (Author)

"A collection of short stories about grief, death, and trauma, set primarily in the US (from the Salem witch trials to present day), with one story set in Mesoamerica"--

Back Jacket

American Grief in Four Stages is a collection of stories that imagines trauma as a space in which language fails us and narrative escapes us. These stories play with form and explore the impossibility of elegy and the inability of our culture to communicate grief, or sympathy, outside of cliché.

One narrator, for example, tries to understand her brother's suicide by excavating his use of idioms. Other stories construe grief and trauma in much subtler ways--the passing of an era or of a daughter's childhood, the seduction of a neighbor, the inability to have children. From a dinner party with Aztecs to an elderly shut-in's recollection of her role in the Salem witch trials, these are stories that defy expectations and enrich the imagination. As a whole, this collection asks the reader to envisage the ways in which we suffer as both unbearably painful and unbearably American.

Author Biography

Sadie Hoagland is an assistant professor of English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and the former editor of Quarterly West. Her work has appeared in Alice Blue Review, The Black Herald, Mikrokosmos Journal, South Dakota Review, Sakura Review, Grist, Oyez Review, Passages North, Five Points, The Fabulist, and elsewhere. Learn more at sadiehoagland.com.