Beautiful Soon Enough
184 pages, 6 x 9
28
Paperback
Release Date:20 Aug 2009
ISBN:9781573661492
Winner of FC2's American Book Review/Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize
Margo Berdeshevsky’s Beautiful Soon Enough is a collection of hypnotic stories that capture the lives—worldly, sexual, obsessive—of twenty–three arresting women.These are snapshots and collages: stories of women on the outside, looking in; of women content to end their affairs; of young women learning the power of seduction; and of older women reminiscing about past loves. They are women who cannot live without love’s embrace, and women who have found it and feel that it is never enough. They are women "of a certain age," as the French might say, and women with naked hearts, of any age.Berdeshevsky’s tales cross the planet: from beds in Paris to the roofs of Havana, from Venice Beach to the hills of Dubrovnik. With settings as varied as the characters they depict, these tales illuminate the lives of women desperate for a balance between love, comfort, and freedom. Personal, driven, and lyrical, together they are Beautiful Soon Enough.
Beautiful Soon Enough is a slim collection of twenty-three stories, some as short as two pages, others somewhat longer, each a jewel in its own right, set to perfection in relation to the whole, and subtly accompanied by photographs and photo montages done by the author.’ —Necessary Fiction
‘Margo Berdeshevsky is a mature poet and world citizen whose ever-lively sense of wonder both at the world and at language is a constant in her work. This is writing with emotional power, great beauty and immediacy, found in the here-and-now, woven with extraordinary awareness of what is precisely not beautiful in human life. So MUCH verbal beauty, with the eternal quality of the tale or fable.’ —Marilyn Hacker
Comprised of twenty-three stories, ranging in length from one to eight pages, these are artfully sculpted fictions conveyed with astonishing phrasing, yet transmitted with relative ease. Equally poetic are Berdeshevsky’s alluring black and white photographs that act as accompaniments, indeed as an interstices, to the short fictions. Berdeshevsky intertwines form and content in the same way the bodies of strangers come together, impulsively and hungry, who then part, with even deeper desires.’ —Poetry International
Margo Berdeshevsky’s Beautiful Soon Enough is a thrillingly cutting-edge work of photos and short short stories flowing together into an extended erotic dream that limns the inner lives of women deeply yearning for connection and authenticity. This is a splendid book by a fine poet turning into an equally fine fiction writer.’ —Robert Olen Butler
‘Margo Berdeshevsky understands the diabolical complexity of the human heart, and how eros is a form of intelligence as well as a drive. Writing with lyric accuracy and necessary forgiveness about the turmoils of love, she also declares the 8th Deadly Sin: the refusal of intense experience.’ —Sven Birkerts
Margo Berdeshevsky is the author of the poetry collection But a Passage in Wilderness. She lives in Paris.
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