Steven Wingate
fiction & more
Wifeshopping
WifeshoppingStories by Steven Wingate
Winner of the 2007 Katharine Bakeless Nason Prize in Fiction from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference
A Mariner Original
Forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Books
(July 1, 2008)
An honest, absorbing debut fiction collection, Wifeshopping centers on the ultimate human quest: the search for companionship, love, and understanding. These captivating stories feature American men, love-starved and striving, who try and often fail to connect with the women they imagine could be their wives. Some of the women are fiancees, some are new girlfriends, some are strangers who cross the men's paths for only a few hours or moments.
In “Beaching It,” an artist traveling on the summer circuit begins an affair with a rich, married local. In “Me and Paul,” a lonely traveler adopts an alter ego to help him impress a single mother. In “Bill,” a trip to a flea market highlights the essential differences between a man and his fiancée. Throughout this thoroughly entertaining read, Wingate’s sympathetic characterizations reveal both the hopefulness and the heartache behind our earnest but sometimes misguided attempts at intimacy. centers on the ultimate human quest: the search for companionship, love, and understanding. These captivating stories feature American men, love-starved and striving, who try and often fail to connect with the women they imagine could be their wives. Some of the women are fiancées, some are new girlfriends, some are strangers who cross the men’s paths for only a few hours or moments.
PRAISE and ACCOLADES
for Wifeshopping:"What makes these studies in discovery and disillusionment so startling and affecting is the energy of Steven Wingate's language, and the agency of his characters; the author's stance ensures a fair fight; in a Wifeshopping story, both parties have a chance. . . . The stories in Wifeshopping expand with subsequent readings; they do not end on the page, but continue in a reader's mind. Their success comes from Wingate's surpassing skill as a writer, and his vision of what can happen when we are made to forfeit a fantasy."
Amy Hempel, author of The Dog of the Marriage and Tumble Home
for "Me and Paul":
“Here’s a story that succeeds not least for its narrator’s bittersweet understanding of himself, not to mention the verve of its prose. This is a story told efficiently, its élan foremost in voice. Its characters are, happily, recognizably human, beset by the small wishes common to our tribe when it spies the future limping away into the distance. I like, too, the story’s unpredictability and, yes, its inevitably preordained end.”
Lee K. Abbott, author of All Things, All at Once
writing in The Journal (Ohio State University's Literary Magazine)
writing in The Journal (Ohio State University's Literary Magazine)
for "Beaching It":
“Steven Wingate’s 'Beaching It' has a Richard Ford-type quality in the main character’s inability to make even his modest aspirations a reality. Wingate paints the craftspeople who populate the fairs and markets of small town New England with such a fine brush—he points out the warts and the scars of all of his characters without seeming judgmental. This extends to a brilliant sex scene, which should win an award all on its own for being awkward, cruel, and memorable.”
Jim Scott, New Pages.com