Publishers Weekly
03/08/2021
Sestanovich’s intelligent debut collection demonstrates a gift for pithy detail that encapsulates the whole of a character’s personality or era of lived experience. In the title story, protagonist Leonora is hung up on an ex: “They had exchanged love letters and endured two or three pregnancy scares. Once, they had been accosted at knifepoint. They had gone to funerals together. Most of all, they had fought passionately.” In “Annunciation,” the passive ennui of recent graduate Iris is juxtaposed against the more definitive, if slightly absurd, lives of others: her married housemates are in a food-oriented polyamorous relationship with another couple; Iris’s best friend teaches her “to eat burgers and bagels and bacon—there was nothing as powerful as eating masculine foods with feminine grace.” At times, the observations and jokes give way to poignant insights into the characters’ psyches: in “Wants and Needs,” Val, misinterpreting a facial expression, is “filled with bitterness for all the faces that had refused to reveal themselves to her.” The collection finds cohesion around the quiet angst of mostly young, female narrators who long for experiences, other people, and states of being just beyond their grasp. These technically accomplished if not quite revolutionary stories demonstrate a high command of craft. Agent: Bill Clegg, the Clegg Agency. (June)
From the Publisher
A PEN/ROBERT W. BINGHAM PRIZE NOMINEE• A Best Book of the Summer: The Wall Street Journal, Entertainment Weekly, Vogue, Lit Hub, Vulture, Esquire, Refinery29, and The Millions • One of Electric Literature's Best Short Story Collections of the Year • Clare Sestanovich was selected as one of The National Book Foundation's "5 under 35" for Objects of Desire
“A debut story collection of the rarest kind: One in which you wish that every single entry could be an entire novel."
—Seija Rankin, Entertainment Weekly
“Sparingly told, evoked with lacerating intimacy, these stories explode across the fault lines of the small decisions that make a life . . . Extraordinary.”
—Esquire
“Sestanovich's stories bear tender, perceptive rigor, fully unfurled. . . . lively and profound . . . wildly perceptive . . . Objects of Desire is a full-throated arrival of a striking voice.”
—Leslie Jamison, Electric Lit
“Astonishing—one of the best story collections I’ve read in a long time. The stories in Objects of Desire are subtle and sophisticated, written with sensitive lucidity and warmth; their emotional effects are brought about naturally . . . one leaves each of the stories feeling a little homesick. I feel like I've found a new favorite writer.”
—Brandon Taylor, author of Filthy Animals and Real Life
“Smart and accomplished . . . Sestanovich’s prose is poised and understated, sensorily precise . . . [Her characters] are wryly astute in their assessments of others; it is a pleasure to see the world through their sharp eyes. Sestanovich’s gift is to make ordinary moments shine brightly.”
—Kirstin Valdez Quade, The New York Times Book Review
“With Sestanovich, the everyday is a little shinier. Objects of Desire is filled with [the] kind of details that make up the world . . . both the vivid and the mundane . . . haunting."
—Clare Marie Schneider, NPR
“Sestanovich’s clear and singular prose illuminates these stories a way that truly makes this debut collection stand out.”
—Emma Specter, Vogue
“Sestanovich’s steady hand and bone-clean prose recall such foremothers as Joan Didion, Zadie Smith, and Jhumpa Lahiri. Moments of epiphany, or at least self-understanding, accompany everyday activities. . . . Through hysterectomies, miscarriages, and unstable relationships, her cast of canny protagonists come to terms with their wants and needs.”
—Elinor Hitt, The Paris Review Daily
“The stories in Objects of Desire offer something of the same thrill [as] eavesdropping at brunch. Sublimely polished . . . sharp . . . topical . . . Sestanovich’s characters [are] immaculately drawn . . . Her pleasurable, discrete dramas achieve something extra: along with their acute social observations and pithy elegance, they collectively probe the gap between how we’re seen and how we might long to appear.”
—Hephzibah Anderson, The Guardian (UK)
“Luminous . . . Sestanovich writes with a kind of bracing cold-plunge clarity. Objects of Desire taps into the peculiar, primal struggle of becoming who you are, and all the stories you have to tell yourself to get there. Grade: A”
—Leah Greenblatt, Entertainment Weekly
“Exquisitely observed, and sure to stay with you long after you’ve finished."
—Bustle
“Hilarious . . . deadpan . . . In Objects of Desire, we meet a large, angsty, mostly privileged cast of characters who nonetheless seem to reflect a society that’s been knocked back on its heels. Sestanovich is an elegant writer whose stories deftly capture the foods, clothes and customs of contemporary life.”
—Ann Levin, Associated Press
“Filled with subtle yet significant gestures . . . Sestanovich remains attuned to the often precarious dynamics between her characters. She reveals how friends, family, and lovers perform or fail to perform for one another—how there will always be mystery, miscommunication, and strangeness even in the most intimate of relationships.”
—Poets & Writers
“A fun read [that] reminds us that we’re all human.”
—Kaia Gerber, quoted in The Wall Street Journal
"Objects of Desire is one of those rare collections that is both deeply emotional and affecting and also just so much fun to read. Clare Sestanovich writes a sentence sharp enough to cut yourself on. A magnificent debut."
—Nathan Englander, author of Dinner at the Center of the Earth
“Clare Sestanovich’s stories compelled me like gravity, and offered sharp, surprising, singular bursts of grace. Her characters are observed with wry, prism-gazed tenderness; sketched deftly and persuasively with just a few perfect strokes. The details go off like bombs. These stories know strange, important truths about what it feels like to be alive.”
—Leslie Jamison, author of The Recovering and The Empathy Exams
“Objects of Desire reminds me of the soulful stories that emerged in mid-century America, the heyday for the form. Each one is bursting with small, explosive moments, like fireworks illuminating the bareness of the protagonists’ lives . . . Sestanovich is a skilled craftswoman, each sentence a carefully positioned tile in a mosaic.”
—Vulture
“Nuanced, beautifully shaped ... In Sestanovich’s hands, the mundane feels surprising—mesmerizing, even.”
—Refinery29
“These stories offer a master class in capturing the complexities of everyday life.”
—Booklist
“Elegant . . . captivating . . . filled with shrewd observations and emotional truth.”
—Malcolm Forbes, Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Sestanovich’s elegant prose takes seriously the quiet unrest that can ravage a life, and makes room for the pleasure and discovery that can be found in that ruin.”
—Raven Leilani, author of Luster
“These stories are wickedly perceptive—Sestanovich precisely measures the distance between how people think of themselves and how the world reads them. A mesmerizing, exquisite debut.”
—Dana Spiotta, author of Wayward
“Objects of Desire is a marvel. With pointillist precision, Clare Sestanovich captures the apparently inconsequential decisions on which a life turns: the phone call made or ignored; the email replied to or archived; the invitation accepted or declined. Her observation of ordinary moments is transformative—I loved this book.”
—Miranda Popkey, author of Topics of Conversation
“Sestanovich’s debut collection demonstrates a gift for pithy detail [and] a high command of craft. [Her] observations…give way to poignant insights into the characters’ psyches. Objects of Desire finds cohesion around the quiet angst of narrators who long for experiences, other people, and states of being just beyond their grasp… Intelligent, technically accomplished stories.”
—Publishers Weekly
Kirkus Reviews
2021-03-31
Short fiction populated by characters whose various longings remain unfulfilled.
In “By Design,” the second story in Sestanovich’s debut collection, Suzanne, a successful graphic designer and the founder of her own firm, is sued for sexual harassment by a younger male colleague. Suzanne’s life falls to pieces: She pulls the plug on her marriage, leaves her company, throws out all her clothing, and moves into a high-rise, where she keeps her apartment’s shelves bare. Her adult son asks her to design his wedding invitations. They will reflect Suzanne’s aesthetic, she thinks: “elegant….Occasionally a little too austere.” The same could be said of Sestanovich. These stories are restrained, nearly aloof, despite the fact that the characters are constantly and messily butting up against the futility of their desires. In “Old Hope,” the young, aimless narrator decides to suddenly resume correspondence with her former high school English teacher while she and a male friend struggle to understand whether they are attracted to each other. The title story features a narrator who shares a tiny apartment with her guitarist/activist boyfriend, watching his life unravel at the same time her ex is elected to Congress and not being sure where her loyalties lie, if anywhere at all. The closing story, “Separation,” traces the life of Kate and the various separations she endures: first when her young husband dies, then when she works at a nursery school helping toddlers with separation anxiety, then, finally, as the mother of a troubled young woman who leaves home to move across the country. Even in these emotionally wrenching scenarios, Sestanovich remains taciturn, offering the reader images and sentences of delicate beauty but leaving much, perhaps too much, unspoken.
A collection shot through with crystalline moments but that ultimately holds readers at arm’s length.
