Little Sinners, and Other Stories

Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, Karen Browns Little Sinners, and Other Stories features a sad, strange mosaic of women and men grappling with the loss and pain of everyday existence, people inhabiting a suburban landscape haunted by ghosts a mother who leaps from a ridge, a mistress found at the bottom of the Connecticut River, a father who dresses in a pale blue-custom suit—and disappears. The dead leave behind postcards, houses, bottles of sherry, bones. They become local legends, their stories part of the characters own an expectant mother in an isolated cottage on Long Island Sound uncovers an unsettling secret in her backyard a troubled housewife is lured to a dinner party by a teenage girl whose mother has vanished under mysterious circumstances a woman and her lover swim the pools of their neighborhood under cover of darkness a young heiress struggles with mortality and the abandonments in her past.