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Some Possible Solutions

In a spine-tingling new collection, the unique and wickedly funny Helen Phillips offers an idiosyncratic series of "what-ifs" about our fragile human condition

What if you knew the exact date of your death? What if your perfect hermaphrodite match existed on another planet? What if your city was filled with doppelgangers of you?

In these remarkably inventive stories Helen Phillips' characters search for solutions to the problem of survival in an irrational, infinitely strange world. We meet a wealthy woman who purchases a high-tech sex toy in the shape of a man, a mother convinced that her children are from another planet, and orphaned twin sisters who work as futuristic strippers. As they strive for intimacy and struggle to resolve their fraught relationships with each other, and with themselves, we realise these dystopias are uncannily close to our own world.

By turns surreal, witty, and perplexing, these bewitching stories are ultimately a reflection of our own reality and of the biggest existential questions we all face

Helen Phillips is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award, the Italo Calvino Prize and more. She is the author of the widely acclaimed novel The Beautiful Bureaucrat, also published by Pushkin Press. Her debut collection And Yet They Were Happy was named a notable book by The Story Prize. Her work has appeared in Tin House, Electric Literature, and The New York Times. An assistant professor of creative writing at Brooklyn College, she lives in Brooklyn with her husband and children.


Author:

  • Helen Phillips

Format:

  • E-book

Duration:

  • 137 pages

Language:

English

Categories:

  • Fiction
  • Short stories

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  • 6 books

    Helen Phillips

    Helen Phillips is the author of six books, including the novel The Need, a National Book Award nominee and a New York Times Notable Book. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. Her collection Some Possible Solutions received the John Gardner Fiction Book Award. Her novel The Beautiful Bureaucrat was a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A professor at Brooklyn College, she lives in Brooklyn with artist/cartoonist Adam Douglas Thompson and their children.

    Read more

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