BELIEVER BOOK AWARD FINALIST In prose shimmering with intelligence and compassion, Michelle Latiolais dissects the essentials of everyday life to find the heartbeat within.” Alice Sebold , author of The Lovely Bones Widow is a hymn to reverence, simultaneously heartbroken and celebratory. Michelle Latiolais has given us the rarest item, a splendidly articulated masterpiece.” William Kittredge In this luminous collection of stories, the gifted Michelle Latiolais writes of loss in all its surprising manifestations. Widow is a devastation and a wonder.” Christine Schutt There is something mysterious about this book, as there always is in the writing that matters most. It eludes explanation. It illumines terrifying realities. Only because these pages seem nakedly willing to take the imprint of every emotion, no matter how ugly, do they possess this great beauty.” Elizabeth Tallent The stories of Widow conjure the nuances of inner sensations as if hitting the notes of a song, deftly played across human memory. These meditations bravely explore the physiology of grief through a masterful interweaving of tender insight and unflinching detailreminding us that the inner life is best understood through the medium of storytelling. Among these stories of loss are interwoven other tales, creating a bridge to the ineffable pleasures and follies of life before the catastrophe. Throughout this collection, Latiolais captures the longing, humor, and strange grace that accompany life’s most transformative chapters. Michelle Latiolais is the author of Widow: Stories, a New York Times Editor's Choice selection, and two previous novels, including A Proper Knowledge, also published by Bellevue Literary Press. She is the recipient of the Gold Medal for Fiction from the Commonwealth Club of California and an English professor and co-director of the Programs in Writing at the University of California at Irvine. We first meet the widow in consultation with an oafish gynecologist and instantly tune into her rapier intelligence, discipline, drollery, and grief. She is too young to be widowed, and intimations of medical malpractice associated with her husband’s death are embedded in each of her stories, until, at last, the terrible truth is unveiled. But Latiolais judiciously separates the widow’s tales from the other concise yet loaded stories about women and longing, wives and husbands, and the body deprived. A master of banter, Latiolais is happily bawdy and gorgeously sensual. She is also archly imaginative and psychologically astute. In Boys, a woman is amused and stirred by the male performers in a Vegas strip club. Pink begins with a museum collection of teacups and dives into our very origins. An oyster knife makes a match in Gut, a hilarious love story. The humor and habits that hold couples together, the odd contracts we make with ourselves, loneliness, the social taboo against grief––all take potent form in Latiolais’ 17 intricate stories, finely patterned miniatures spiked with the unexpected. --Donna Seaman BELIEVER BOOK AWARD FINALIST “Pulse[s] with a surprising, offbeat erotic energy.” ― Elle “Latiolais is as close to Alice Munro as a writer can get, but with a more modern edge to her tone, low graceful notes, not too much flash, perfect restraint and the feeling of contents under pressure.” ― Los Angeles Times “Sublime . . . [Latiolais] manages to find something luminous in the broken shards―still sharp, still drawing blood―that remain in the wake of losing what could not feasibly be lost.” ― San Francisco Chronicle “Filled with an intensity of vision . . . Latiolais plunges courageously into odd territory, noticing and observing the felt life in precise and often beautiful language.” ―Minneapolis Star Tribune “Latiolais has a supple, sensitive way with words. . . . [ Widow ] celebrates the Geiger counter aspect of human consciousness that records and overwrites a deep document of self-reflection.” ― OCMetro magazine “For the intimate ways that it explores the recesses of grief with warmth, earthiness, and humor, Widow is the most emotionally resonant book I’ve read this year.” ― Open Letters Monthly “Latiolais is bold and frank, and utterly unsentimental. . . . Widow rivets our attention because it offers what all literature, tragic, comical or otherwise, should: a distillation of experience and a concentration of thought that invests a simple moment with all the profundity of existence itself.” ― Zyzzyva “Excellent, heartbreaking . . . reading Widow was a profound experience. . . . [Latiolais] takes the ordinary and shows how it doesn’t exist. There is only the great mystery of the moments of our lives, which can at best turn into vivid memories. And after that? It is that afterlife, the after of all those mysterious, precious moments, that soaks this book. Death, something so final, still remains the unanswerable question that follows our lives, and Latiolias ponders this bea