Who Do You Love – Stories

1999 In this acclaimed collection, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, Jean Thompson limns the lives of ordinary people — a lonely social worker, a down-and-out junkie, a divorced cop on the night shift — to extraordinary effect. With wisdom and sympathy and spare eloquence, she writes of their inarticulate longings for […]

Throw Like a Girl – Stories

2007 Here are twelve stories that take dead aim at the secrets of womanhood, arcing from youth to experience. Each one of Thompson’s indelible characters — lovers, wives, friends, and mothers — speaks her piece — wry, angry, hopeful — about the world and women’s places in it. A master of short fiction whose “best […]

Do Not Deny Me – Stories

2009 When Jean Thompson — “America’s Alice Munro” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review)—is telling stories, “You cannot put the book down” (The Seattle Times), and her superlative new collection, Do Not Deny Me, is one to be savored, word by word. Here is a title that demands — and commands — attention in and of itself. Yet […]

The Witch and Other Tales Re-Told

2014 Great fairy tales are not always stories designed for children. The lurking wolf in “Little Red Riding Hood,” the gingerbread house that lures Hansel and Gretel, the beauty asleep in her castle—these fables represent some of our deepest, most primeval fears and satisfy our longing for good to win out over evil (preferably in […]