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Hum: Stories – winner of the Truman Capote Prize

About This Book

“Told with intelligence and lucidity…Hum is disquieting and masterful, emblematic of a book given over to the study of couplings come undone.” Rikki Ducornet, in the foreword to Hum

Winner of the Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize

Thirteen years after the publication of her first story collection, The Girl in the Fall-Away Dress, New York Times bestselling author Michelle Richmond returns with Hum, a collection of ten stories that examine love, lust, and loyalty from surprising angles.

In “Hum,” a young couple that is paid to live in a house filled with surveillance equipment becomes “quietly lost to each other,” as the wife’s infatuation with the subject of their surveillance turns to obsession. In “Medicine,” a woman grieving over the death of her sister finds her calling as a manual medical caregiver. In “Boulevard,” a couple who has been trying to have a child for seven years finds themselves in an unnamed country at the height of a revolution, summoned there by the enigmatic H. “Scales,” the story of a woman who falls in love with a man whose body is covered with scales, parses the intersection of pain and pleasure. The narrator of “Lake” must choose whether to walk in the footsteps of her famous grandfather, The Great Amphibian, who disappeared while performing a feat of daring in Lake Michigan. What does it mean to be heroic? How much should one sacrifice in the name of love? These questions and more are explored with tenderness, wit, and unerring precision in Hum.

“These stories are mesmerizing, sensual…beautifully imagined tales that lead us from the familiar to the intimately strange. Richmond writes as if she lives comfortably in this world and another dreamy, concurrent dimension that is achingly just beyond our ken.”—Brad Watson, author of Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives