In the House
136 pages, 5 1/2 x 8 1/2
Paperback
Release Date:18 Mar 2010
ISBN:9781573661546
A collection of stories that limn the dangers of domesticity
In Lynn K. Kilpatrick’s In the House, anything can happen. A collection of shorts—lists, character sketches, directions, scripts, and instructions—In the House reveals the often conspicuous, yet frequently overlooked, dangers of relationships gone awry.
In a home suffused with fragility or in a kitchen surrounded by knives, Kilpatrick’s men and women navigate around one another’s eccentricities with caution, highlighting the unspoken desires and veiled needs of domestic routine. In these stories those desires collide, illuminating the dangers that can lurk in seemingly insignificant places such as the pantry, a basement, the Miss America pageant, dioramas, or in the mind of the one you love.
With astonishing agility and the sharp edge of terrifying humor, Lynn Kilpatrick slits the fragile skin of identity to expose a thousand marvelously dangerous possibilities. You might be the child who disappears or the girl who becomes Miss America. Either way, your life is precarious, held in place by your own tenuous illusions and the wild confabulations of the woman on the other side of the glass, your bold, inventive neighbor.'
—Melanie Rae Thon, author of Iona Moon, Meteors in August, and Girls in the Grass
‘In the House is a dazzlingly smart and deeply funny excavation of what goes on behind closed doors. Lynn Kilpatrick's characters are at once utterly bizarre and entirely recognizable and the stories she tells about them in you-have-to-go-back-and-read-that-sentence-one-more-time-because-it's-so-damn-good prose are tender and sharp and full of heart. This is a book that is brave enough to say what most of us won't and wise enough to remind us why that kind of bravery matters.’—Cheryl Strayed, author of Torch
Lynn K. Kilpatrick earned an MA in poetry from WesternWashingtonUniversity and a PhD in fiction from the University of Utah. Her poetry, fiction and non-fiction have appeared in Tin House, Hotel Amerika, Ninth Letter, and Creative Nonfiction. She lives in Salt Lake City with her husband and son.
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