Vintage Contemporaries / You Have a Friend in 10A

had sold off most of the cattle and bought two dozen new horses, a breeding stallion among them. He bought saddles and bridles, built a new barn with a double-size stall for Sleepy Jean, expanded the lodge, and put in a bigger kitchen. When construction was under way on ten guest cabins and a new bunkhouse, he fired the worst of the old wranglers and placed his ad.

Sammy showed up two days after the man with one arm. She must have hitched out to the ranch, because when he caught sight of her she was just a white dot walking up the dirt road from the highway. His first impulse when he saw she was only a kid was to send her away, but he was sympathetic toward the too-skinny. Moreover, he thought the dudes who would be paying his future bills might be intrigued by a girl wrangler in a way they would not have been by a man with a pinned-up sleeve who tied knots with his teeth. Mr. Otterbausch maintained a shiny and very bristly mustache, and his fingers stole up to tug at it.

Can you shoot? he asked.

Yeah, she said.

How are you with a rope?

All right.

And you ride good?

Yup.

He dropped a saddle and bridle in her arms and showed her a short-legged twist of a buckskin, a bitch mare who had recently not only thrown Mr. Otterbausch but kicked him for good measure, leaving a boomerang-shaped bruise on his thigh. When Sammy pulled the cinch tight, the mare flattened her ears and lunged around, her square teeth biting the air until Sammy popped her on the cheek. The mare squealed and pointed her nose at the sky, then stood still. Sammy climbed up. The mare dropped her head and crow-hopped off to the right. Sammy tugged the reins up once and drove with her seat and sent the mare through the gate into the home paddock. In five minutes, she had her going around like a show pony.

Hang on

many books You Have A Friend In 10A offers an array of intriguing, satisfying, quick reads perfect for punctuating your May rotation. AV Club

Maggie Shipstead s greatest talent is the exquisite control she exercises over all her writing. Like her novels, the stories in this collection exhibit precision handling of plot, pacing, and the relations between characters . . . Shipstead is masterful at using revelation to create meaning and impact. Read the book and you will be in good hands. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

[You Have a Friend in 10A] gives readers the inspiring experience of charting the maturation of one of America's finest authors . . . The finest stories in You Have a Friend in 10A show that perpetual grief may not necessarily lead to great lives, but it can produce scintillating fiction. - BookPage

You Have a Friend in 10A displays impressive range in these variegated narratives, whether it s MFA dude-bro culture in Acknowledgments or a cult-involved movie star in the collection s title story. [Shipstead's] writing leans long all of the stories but one run at least twenty pages but as a result, Shipstead is able to construct fully-functioning worlds and then provide the characters within them the breadth to both breathe and grow . . . [Her] aim is always latitudinous precision that serves both the ampleness of storylines and her enduring characters. The Sewanee Review

A collection of tightly woven, sharply drawn short stories that explore love, longing, destiny and human entanglement. Each story is a fresh discovery and an exciting surprise, and you won't want to miss a single one. Good Housekeeping

Acclaimed author Shipstead turns her considerable talent to the short story, offering readers this sweeping collection crafted over the course of a decade . . . the resulting collection is an effortlessly transporting and piercing journey . . . Reaching across decades and set in a diverse array of locations both domestic and exotic, Shipstead's latest will find a home on bookshelves next to the work of Andre Dubus III, Jane Smiley, and Richard Russo. Booklist [Starred Review]

The 10 stories in this daring, wide-ranging debut collection from Shipstead (after the novel Great Circle) resonate as they leap across time and space . . . The masterwork is the deeply unsettling La Moretta. Interspersed with segments from an enigmatic inquisition, it documents a honeymoon excursion gone horribly wrong. Here and throughout, Shipstead demonstrates a remarkable ability to interlace the events of ordinary life with a mythological sense of preordained destruction. Both formally inventive and emotionally complex, this pays off with dividends. Publishers Weekly  [Starred Review]

In this follow-up to her Booker short-listed Great Circle, Shipstead displays luminous, exacting language as she demonstrates her flair for creating distinctive characters who deal more or less successfully with what life has handed them . . . In the standout Souterrain ( subterranean in French), feckless Iris inherits a house in Paris from her blind grandfather, Pierre, and a story unfolds of a family tragedy during World War II; Pierre s guilt over his inadvertent role in events, despite his youth; the painfully suppressed past of his housekeeper, Madame Harmou; and the tragic misunderstanding that dooms her son. Here as elsewhere, the characters lives are shaped by unexpected or hidden events, large and small, and in the end Pierre s memories will join the dark matter that surrounds the living: the memories of the dead, undetectable but still exerting force. Library Journal [Starred Review]