Death Is Not an Option

In these stories, a teacher obsesses over a student who comes to class with scratch marks on his face; a Catholic girl graduating high school finds a warped kind of redemption in her school's contrived class rituals; and a woman looking to rent a house is sucked into a strangely inappropriate correspondence with one of the landlords. These are just a few of the powerful plotlines in Suzanne Rivecca's gorgeously wrought collection. From a college student who adopts a false hippie persona to find love, to a young memoirist who bumps up against a sexually obsessed fan, the characters in these fiercely original tales grapple with what it means to be honest with themselves and the world.

These stories explode "with piercing insight . . . illuminating the dangerous dance between victims and saviors. [They] deliver us to the edge of grief, that precarious place where the moral compass spins--where codes of love and law and religion fail. Mercy here depends on a tiger's sublime grace, our capacity to resist deeper harm, and the right of every broken being to remain silent" (Melanie Rae Thon).

Author: Suzanne Rivecca
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 07/01/2011
Pages: 226
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.42lbs
Size: 8.24h x 5.58w x 0.58d
ISBN: 9780393339901

Review Citation(s):
Entertainment Weekly 07/08/2011 pg. 113
New York Times Book Review 08/14/2011 pg. 28

About the Author
Rivecca, Suzanne: - Suzanne Rivecca's fiction has appeared in Best New American Voices 2009, among other publications. A winner of the Pushcart Prize and a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, she lives in San Francisco.