May
13
1:30am
Skylit: The Mysteries by Marisa Silver, with Laura van den Berg
By Skylight Books
The Mysteries (Bloomsbury)
From the New York Times bestselling author of Mary Coin, a masterful, intimate story of two young girls, joined in an unlikely friendship, whose lives are shattered in a single, unthinkable moment.
Miggy Brenneman is a wild and reckless seven-year-old with a fierce imagination, hellbent on pushing against the limits of childhood. Ellen is polite, cautious, and drawn to her friend's bright flame. While the adults around them adjust to unstable times and fractured relationships, the girls respond with increasingly dangerous play. When tragedy strikes, all the novel's characters grapple with questions of fate and individual responsibility, none more so than Miggy, who must make sense of a swiftly disappearing past and a radically transformed future.
Written with a searing clarity and surpassing tenderness, THE MYSTERIES limns the painful ambiguities of adulthood and the intense perceptions of an indelibly drawn child to offer a profound exploration of how all of us, at every stage, must reckon with life's abundant and unsolvable mysteries.
PRAISE for THE MYSTERIES:
"Even a loyal, longtime reader of Marisa Silver's outstanding previous stories and novels might be unprepared for the power and delicacy of THE MYSTERIES. I found it to be a novel of almost unbearable intimacy. As one character, Celeste, thinks: ‘She's never learned to trust the idea of family.’ For good reason, as the complexities—and profound mysteries—of family life form the beating heart of this stunning, uncanny novel.” - Peter Orner, MAGGIE BROWN and OTHERS: stories
Marisa Silver is the author of six previous works of fiction, including the novels Mary Coin, a New York Times Bestseller, and Little Nothing, a New York Times Editor’s Choice. Her short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker and been included in The Best American Short Stories and The O. Henry Prize Stories. Silver has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center. She teaches at the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
Laura van den Berg is the author of five works of fiction, most recently the novel The Third Hotel, a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction, and the story collection I Hold a Wolf by the Ears, which was one of TIME'S 10 Best Fiction Books of 2020. She is the recipient of a Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Bard Fiction Prize, a PEN/O. Henry Prize, a MacDowell Colony fellowship, and is a two-time finalist for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. Born and raised in Florida, Laura splits her time between the Boston area and Central Florida, with her husband and dog.
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