Description:
Adults and Other Children follows four women as they navigate life from the confusion and innocence of childhood to the bizarre and darkly humorous complexities of adulthood.
Along the way, we meet a vindictive, and imaginary, nanny, who casts doubts about the true identity of a little girl's new baby sister; a group of friends who spend their time obsessing over the gory details of a spate of recent crimes; a college professor who has her boss fired over an imagined sexual assault; and a Jewish woman who feigns ignorance in her religion, hoping to endear herself to an Orthodox widower.
Time and again, the girls and women in this riveting debut collection fantasize and deceive to get what they want―or what they think they want―while we find ourselves drawn to their often surprising and all too human behavior.
Brief description:
Adults and Other Children is Miriam Cohen's debut collection. Her stories have appeared in the Black Warrior Review, StoryQuarterly, West Branch Wired, Cream City Review, the Florida Review, DIAGRAM, The Collagist, Cimarron Review, Carve, the Bennington Review, Fugue, Hobart, Image, Witness, Electric Lit, and Third Coast. The recipient of a Carol Houck Smith Fiction fellowship at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, she received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College.
Review Quotes:
"In the weird and gorgeous tradition of Angela Carter and Kelly Link, Miriam Cohen has written a manifesto of postmodern womanhood. Her characters are hilariously neurotic, exquisitely self-diminishing, and yet grotesquely eloquent―perverse poets all, wandering the streets of New York or suffocating in the decorated living rooms of suburbia, trying their dire best to navigate life's labyrinths."
-- "Josh Gaylord, author of When We We're Animals"