Jane of Hearts and Other Stories

Katharine Weber

Mas 2022 · Paul Dry Books

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"A scintillating collection of short stories and a novella that encompass pathos and hilarity and range from breathtakingly succinct yet richly faceted tales, like the diamonds that figure in several unexpectedly connected stories, to longer works iridescent with tangible and psychological detail.”―Booklist

"In elegant prose, Weber offers intimate views on her characters’ inner lives. At its best, this offers an ode to the universality of change.”―Publishers Weekly

“Weber’s genius in these startling, haunting stories is to find the momentary connections in things that make up or derail a life, be it an artichoke and a dead woman’s earrings, or a plant and a hospice worker. Written in prose as dazzling and finecrafted as diamonds, Weber’s stories show us ordinary people in extraordinary moments, doing what the best literature does―they make us look at our own world differently.”―Caroline Leavitt, author of Pictures of You and Cruel Beautiful World

At the heart of every story in this collection, Katharine Weber has located a compelling character in medias res, at a moment when situation, desire, and identity are intersecting and sometimes colliding. Children go door to door selling poison mushrooms. An elderly New Yorker on the brink of losing her freedom bolts for one last dignified adventure. A girl is employed to babysit a sleeping baby she is forbidden to see. In the title novella, lonely children roaming their Connecticut neighborhood discover a forgotten bomb shelter, which they make their secret headquarters. Jane of Hearts offers Katharine Weber’s readers a lively assortment of her short fiction, each story a precise and nuanced investigation of its moments.

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Katharine Weber is the author of six acclaimed novels including Still Life with Monkey, Triangle, True Confections, and The Music Lesson―and a memoir, The Memory of All That. She lives in Connecticut.