We Show What We Have Learned

by Clare Beams

Overview

Winner of the Bard Fiction Prize and a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for debut fiction, the Young Lions Fiction Award, and the Shirley Jackson Award for a single-author collection

Joyce Carol Oates calls Clare Beams “wickedly sharp-eyed, wholly unpredictable . . . a female / feminist voice for the twenty-first century.”

The literary, historic, and fantastic collide in these wise and exquisitely unsettling stories. From bewildering assemblies in school auditoriums to the murky waters of a Depression-era health resort, Beams’s landscapes are tinged with other­worldliness, and her characters’ desires stretch the limits of reality.

Ingénues at a boarding school bind themselves to their headmaster’s vision of perfection; a nineteenth-century landscape architect embarks on his first major project, but finds the terrain of class and power intractable; a bride glimpses her husband’s past when she wears his World War II parachute as a gown; and a teacher comes undone in front of her astonished fifth graders.

As they capture the strangeness of being human, the stories in We Show What We Have Learned reveal Clare Beams’s rare and capacious imagination—and yet they are grounded in emotional complexity, illuminating the ways we attempt to transform ourselves, our surroundings, and each other.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781940596143
Publisher:	Lookout Books
Publication date:	10/25/2016
Pages:	184
Sales rank:	1,145,896
Product dimensions:	8.40(w) x 5.50(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Clare Beams’s story collection, We Show What We Have Learned (Lookout Books), was a Kirkus Best Debut of 2016; was longlisted for the Story Prize; and was a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, and the Shirley Jackson Award. Her fiction appears in One Story, n+1, Ecotone, The Common, the Kenyon Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and has received special mention in The Best American Short Stories 2013 and The Pushcart Prize XXXV. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Sustainable Arts Foundation. After teaching high school English for six years in Falmouth, Massachusetts, she moved to Pittsburgh, where she now lives with her husband and two daughters. She has taught creative writing at Carnegie Mellon University and St. Vincent College. Her novel The Illness Lesson will be published by Doubleday/Knopf in 2020.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“A dazzling story collection—as if, by a rare sort of magic, Alice Munro and Shirley Jackson had conspired together to imagine a female/feminist voice for the twenty-first century that is wickedly sharp-eyed, wholly unpredictable, and wholly engaging.”—Joyce Carol Oates, author of The Lost Landscape

“An elegant and assured debut, packed with confident prose—and stories with novel-like wholeness in the way of Munro and Cheever. The stories are imaginative and flecked with darkness and subtle societal commentary in the manner of Margaret Atwood; the characters are complex and rendered with psychological acuity. Smart, savage, and compulsively readable.” —Megan Mayhew Bergman, author of Almost Famous Women

Editorial Reviews

Stories as well executed as these are their own reward, but it's also clear from the capaciousness on display here that Ms. Beams has novels' worth of worlds inside her.

The New York Times - John Williams

08/08/2016
The captivating stories in Beams’s debut collection are impressively varied in both setting and character. In “Hourglass,” a young girl attends a strange, possibly sinister boarding school to receive a “transformational education” and ends up learning about the true meaning—and cost—of beauty. “World’s End,” the collection’s tour de force, follows the journey of a young architect in his effort to prove himself in his profession by taking on a project that might be beyond his means, but which ultimately changes him forever. A young woman fresh off a breakup takes her ailing grandmother on a trip in “Granna,” mostly to prove to her ex that she is capable of being a selfless person. The story’s conclusion is a dazzling exploration of the emotional costs of true empathy. Several stories explore the pain of unrequited love, such as “The Saltwater Cure,” in which a teenage boy working at an inn becomes infatuated with one of the guests and subsequently learns hard lessons about accepting one’s lot in life, and “The Renaissance Person Tournament,” a nuanced portrait of a teacher whose lessons for her young pupil in the titular tournament are more complicated than they seem. Beams is an expert at providing odd and surprising details that make her stories come alive, and the result is a powerful collection about what we need from others and, in turn, what we can offer others of ourselves. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

Stories as well executed as these are their own reward, but it’s also clear from the capaciousness on display here that Ms. Beams has novels’ worth of worlds inside her.” —New York Times

“A richly imagined and impeccably crafted debut . . . from the unflagging elegance of the prose to the wisdom with which Beams approaches the complex emotional terrain her characters navigate.” —Kirkus (starred review), Best Debut Fiction of 2016

“Imaginative, unsettling, and relentlessly sharp, the nine stories of the book are full of immersive detail and fully realized narrators that give believability to the fantastic.” —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“Beams’s collection skillfully and alluringly navigates the border between the familiar and the unexpected, and beguiles and unsettles in equal measure.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Beams is an expert at providing odd and surprising details that make her stories come alive, and the result is a powerful collection about what we need from others and, in turn, what we can offer others of ourselves.” —Publishers Weekly

“This debut collection is full of promise and surreal delight. . . . We hope there’s much more to come from this writer.” —O, The Oprah Magazine

“Beams’s entire collection bewitches—and features complex female characters and feminist takes on broader themes to boot. A sharp eye for detail and an appreciation for emotional nuance underpin Beams’s ability to captivate readers, even as she eschews neat endings in favor of mysteries that linger into discomfort.” —Paste

“Beams’s stories, a cross between Aimee Bender’s and Karen Russell’s, are set in dreamy otherworldly places that are almost recognizable—but not quite. By making her metaphors literal, Beams creates magical—realist pieces that often calculate the high cost of being a woman.” —The Rumpus

“A collection of quiet and unnerving stories where everything is just slightly off-kilter, where the world feels just a little wrong. . . . These stories are angry and odd, and I loved them.” —Amanda Nelson, Book Riot

“Many [stories] take place in dreamy worlds where animalistic shadows hold the promise of renewal, or buildings mysteriously heal themselves. Within these boundaries, each story focuses a brilliant shaft of light on one person’s emotions as they reveal insecurities and secret longings, resulting in vulnerability and intimacy.” —Foreword

“Beams’s stories have a laser-focused honesty that reminds you of the pieces of yourself you’d rather not look at—the conformist, the manipulator, the egotist—yet her work is also profoundly generous, circling back again and again to the tremendous need that makes us behave in ways that are less than noble.” —Fiction Writers Review

“We Show What We Have Learned introduces readers to the brilliant mind of Clare Beams. It has the hair-raising electricity similar to that of a new generation of writers that includes Karen Russell, Diane Cook, David James Poissant, and Kelly Link, yet reads with the stateliness of a bygone era.” —Shelf Awareness

“A dazzling story collection—as if, by a rare sort of magic, Alice Munro and Shirley Jackson had conspired together to imagine a female/feminist voice for the twenty-first century that is wickedly sharp-eyed, wholly unpredictable, and wholly engaging.” —Joyce Carol Oates, author of The Lost Landscape

“An elegant and assured debut, packed with confident prose—and stories with novel-like wholeness in the way of Munro and Cheever. The stories are imaginative and flecked with darkness and subtle societal commentary in the manner of Margaret Atwood; the characters are complex and rendered with psychological acuity. Smart, savage, and compulsively readable.” —Megan Mayhew Bergman, author of Almost Famous Women

“Stunning and brilliant. Clare Beams has a gift for illuminating one character’s most private moment, causing the impact to transform the fates of many. She navigates the tightrope between inner and outer reality. The range of her stories is astonishing—funny and devastating, suspenseful and mesmerizing.” —Ursula Hegi, author of Stones from the River

“These amazingly inventive stories reveal an imagination rare in its command and courage. In gorgeous prose that thrills, instructs, and thoroughly inspires, Clare Beams obliterates the ‘dividing line between possibilities and impossibilities,’ showing how our passions can rule with reality-bending magic.” —Chang-rae Lee, author of On Such a Full Sea

“These stories are at once spooky and lush, eerie and deeply felt, ghostly but also vibrantly alive. Clare Beams is a magician, and each of these stories is a muscular, artful haunting.” —Caitlin Horrocks, author of This Is Not Your City

From the Publisher

★ 2016-07-28
Nine stories that reveal the strangeness underpinning even the most ordinary of lives.In the title story of Beams’ debut collection, an elementary school teacher shocks her students by falling apart—quite literally—in front of the class. At eight pages, it’s the book’s smallest story, but it’s emblematic of Beams’ approach, in which ordinary characters are transformed, often in extraordinary, otherworldly ways. In “All the Keys to All the Doors,” a little-used room in the town hall may provide unexpected solace to a community reeling in the aftermath of a school shooting. In “Granna,” the newly single narrator takes her grandmother back to a family vacation spot and witnesses the mysterious effect it has on the older woman. Not all the stories are tinged with fantastical elements; Beams is equally interested in stepping into other realms by reaching into odd corners of history, as in “Ailments,” in which a young woman becomes obsessed with her sister’s husband, a doctor, during London’s Great Plague. But even when the stories do draw from the tradition of fabulism, they always feel wholly Beams’ own, from the unflagging elegance of the prose to the wisdom with which Beams approaches the complex emotional terrain her characters navigate. With other authors, this philosophizing can feel forced; not so here. Take this for example, from “Granna,” in which the narrator muses on her ex-boyfriend’s assertion that she should not have a child because she didn’t seem maternal: “Yet it seemed terrible of him not to have given her a chance, that largest of all possible chances, to transcend the way she seemed.” It is this gap between what the world seems and what is that Beams tackles so memorably in this collection. A richly imagined and impeccably crafted debut.

Kirkus Review