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All
Things Are Labor
stories
by Katherine Arnoldi
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University of
Massachusetts Press (2007) |
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All Things
Are Labor: Stories by Katherine Arnoldi
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order
Now |
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2007 Reading schedule: I will
be at the AWP conference in New York City at noon, Saturday, February
2, 2008 at the Hilton Hotel. Check the AWP scedule! Then I will
be signing books at the University
of Massacusetts Press booth. Please
come to the reading and do not feel obligated to buy a book!
See the review by Christopher Gaumer
in Rain Taxi's Winter 2007/8 issue!
Advance Praise
for All Things
Are Labor, stories
by Katherine Arnoldi
"Life
congregates in the pages of All
Things Are Labor and Katherine Arnoldi
in her brilliant, ferocious, noisy and lyrical prose wisely
welcomes all-
mothers, addicts, ex-lovers, ministers, children. It is not simply
that Arnoldi is
a brave writer and a truth-teller. It is that each of these stories
make us
truer and braver. This is a beautiful collection of stories.
Read it! Read it!"
--------------------Victoria Redel, author
of Loverboy and The Border of Truth
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Here is fiction driven and formed by such moral
and aesthetic urgency, it sings.
Whether set in the rural south,
rust belt Midwest--just as the rust was setting--or Manhattan's
Lower East Side prior to gentrification, these gorgeous stories
offer visions of broken and redeemed American dreamers-poor people,
single Moms, workers, pacifists, renters. Katherine Arnoldi
follows poetry's ancient, sacred agenda: to terrify
tyrants, encourage the oppressed, and defend the earth.
It works. I love this beautiful book!
------------------ Julia
Spicher Kasdorf, author
of Eve's Striptease, The Body and the Book: Writing from a
Mennonite
Life, co-editor of Broken Land: Poems of Brooklyn,
The Body and the Book: Writing from a Mennonite Life |
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In the lineage of Tillie
Olsen and Diane Di Prima, Katherine Arnoldi writes
with revolutionary honesty and deep love. Her characters are
working class, are mothers, are artists, are people like you
and me--people turning our backs on the fear and obedience we
have been taught--people too rarely honored in literature.
All Things are Labor is a book that renews faith in art, a book
that makes you want to live a better life, a masterpiece.
-------------------Ariel
Gore, author of Atlas
of the Heart, Hip Mama Survival Guide
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"In Katherine Arnoldi's stories, All Things
are Labor, girls are on the loose, long before they're women,
and labor is what they do...wherever, whenever.
These girls are unwed when it's uncool, they're digging, they're
cutting in, carrying on, running around, they're on the move,
street to street, New York City to Utah, in and out of order,
they disrupt, they sweet-talk, they're ready for anything, ready
to hit you over the head with a chair if that's what it takes.
Better yet, when the women in Arnoldi's
fiction have visions, they're big, loud, and smelly. What more
could you want from this fast-paced insider look at outsiders."
-----------------------Janet
Kauffman, author of Collaborators, Obscene Gestures for
Women, Places in the World a Woman Could Walk and Rot |
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How often might one remark
of a work of fiction that there is not a frivolous, underconsidered
word to be found anywhere within it?
All Things Are Labor offers just
such an occasion. Katherine Arnoldi's alertly observed,
gravely precisive stories are giving and feelingful and bravely
original and wise. To read
them is to be smitten, enlarged, graced.
---------------------Gary Lutz,
author of Stories
in the Worst Way and I Looked Alive
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Brilliantly mesmerizing voices
emerge with revelatory force from Katherine Arnoldi's All Things
Are Labor . Often single mothers,
her characters engage in difficult, creative, finally heroic
struggles to construct lives of worth for themselves and their
children. From the gritty ("My Lot") to the visionary
("Journal Found in a Field"), these crafty, laconic,
compelling narratives are triumphs of both the imagination and
the spirit.
---------------------- Jeff Gundy
author of Deerflies
and Walker in the Fog: On Mennonite Writing"
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From
Ohio to Arkansas to a gritty New York City neighborhood; from
the ritualistic feet cleansing of the Mennonites to the trials
and ultimately the triumphs of single motherhood, Arnoldi's exquisite
stories are a journey through time, space, spirit, and the artistic
imagination. This
is art at its highest calling: personal, political, and daring
to reach for the universal. In a resonate language that
demands we pay attention, Arnoldi's prose pulses, whispers, then
roars, singing the lives of the unsung. These stories are
about class and the American dream torn open; about the
spirit of writing itself and how it is language that can save
us, giving voice to the silence and silenced. Katherine
Arnoldi is a major talent, and All Things Are Labor is
a poignant, powerful, important collection.
-----------------Jaimee Wriston Colbert, author of Climbing the God Tree
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Go to Biography for more information about
Katherine Arnoldi
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