Impossibly Small Spaces

The stories in Impossibly Small Spaces write you into a world that is very much today's America. Intensely lyrical, it is brimming with characters whose lives are being shaped by the strictures of their own inadequacies. As in her first collection, Lisa tackles such emotive topics as death, adoption, breast surgery, and rape with subtle intensity. Here are stories where the characrters are either physically or emotionally scarred. They don't know who they are and spend their time trying to prove they exist, often in impossibly small spaces. She gives voice to people holidng onto past hurts, who are not able to talk to one another. Here we meet a young girl who is returned to the orphanage "like a pair of shoes that didn't fit right", or another who dreams an afterlife where the missing parts will find her. One of the significant things about this book is that even with such tough themes, they are not without humor or hope. Hugely perceptive, sizzling with electric images, this is top-class writing where grace and precision are brought to bear on lives that glow brightly in the reader's mind long after the last page. (Geraldine Mills, author of Gold and Hellkite)