The Girl in the Fall-Away Dress
Linked Stories
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Winner of the Grace Paley Prize for Fiction
The stories in Michelle Richmond’s debut collection spin artfully off the life of a single character. Smart & adept.
The New York Times Book Review
A series of locations both familiar and exotic make up the seventeen linked stories in this award-winning debut collection by the New York Times bestselling author of The Year of Fog. Whether leaving, returning, or staying put, the women who narrate these stories are bound to Alabama by history and habit, their voices informed by the landscape and lore of the deep South.
In "Down the Shore Everything's All Right," twenty-eight-year-old Grace abandons wide Southern beaches for New York sidewalks, only to discover that the Gulf Coast still has a hold on her. In "Intermittent Waves of Unusual Size and Force," a wayward father is called home from California by a massive hurricane that threatens the lives of his family. In "The World's Greatest Pants," three younger sisters watch in awe as Darlene, the eldest and bravest, defies her parents and heads for Texas in a battered El Camino.
An undercurrent of eroticism runs through the collection. "Propaganda" finds the youngest sister alone in an old house in Knoxville, where she forms a symbiotic relationship with a mysterious upstairs neighbor during her husband's lengthy absence. In "Fifth Grade: A Criminal History," adolescence and sexuality merge with explosive consequences.
The divine and the absurd are uneasy but frequent bedfellows in these stories. "O-lama-lama" portrays a religious free-for-all at a beachside church in Fairhope, Alabama, while "Slacabamorinico" celebrates the holy commotion of Mardi Gras at a Mobile cemetery. In "The Last Bad Thing," a love-struck young woman in the Bible Belt is haunted by visions of Ramadan.
A valuable resource for students of short fiction, this collection will also delight fans of Richmond's later books: The Year of Fog, No One You Know, Dream of the Blue Room, and the award-winning story collection HUM.
on Publisher's Weekly:This collection of brief sketches alternating with longer fictions hasn't the structure of a novel; but it has a novel's heft, as characters who are just names in one story emerge to take center stage in another. These women's lives are shaped by fate and by place, forces hauntingly evoked by this talented young writer.
Jill McCorkle wrote:Richmond's writing is perceptive and heartfelt, her subjects at once edgy and familiar. This is a winning debut.
on Choice Magazine:The Girl in the Fall-Away Dress is a stunning collection filled with heart-stopping moments of such raw emotion that I am left with a vivid array of visions long remembered afterward. There is humor, there is grief -- the author skillfully keeping us in that precious spot between the two, so that we are always aware of the fragile filaments linking one experience to another.
on Mobile Register:Richmond's 19 charming and accessible short stories, ranging from a punchy single page to a complex 20 pages in length, make up a short-story cycle that revolves primarily around a single family. Presented in a varied and staggered pattern through the points of view of three daughters, the stories recount the family's growth, trials, and tribulations in an almost Joycean, interlocking, family-epic manner: birth and motherhood; religion and education; pain, disease, and death; homosexuality and the splintering of the family. The final effect of this collection of stories is like the feeling of a rising crescendo that one gets from reading a complex contemporary novel...An excellent read, this well-written and thoroughly fascinating short-story cycle is recommended for public libraries and for all academic collections supporting the study of fiction writing.
on Alabama Writers Forum:A talented writer to watch...[Richmond's] writing can be spare, poetic...as she carefully interweaves the mundane and the absurd.
Steve Kettman on San Francisco Chronicle wrote:One of the best story collections I've read in awhile...Richmond's collection might arguably be read as a novel...masterful.
Remember this name: Michelle Richmond...impressive talent and emotional range...Richmond writes with grace, calm, a refreshing sense of playfulness.