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What I Found Out About Her: Stories of Dreaming American, winner of the 2014 Richard Sullivan Prize in Short Fiction, reaffirms Peter LaSalle's reputation as one of the most startlingly original writers working in the short fiction genre today.
In this collection of eleven stories, LaSalle explores how everyday life for many—an FBI agent, a study-abroad student, a drug dealer's chic girlfriend, a trio of Broadway playwrights, among others—can often take on something much larger than that, almost the texture of a haunting dream. Marked by stylistic daring and a rare lyricism in language, this is intense, thoroughly moving fiction that probes the contemporary American psyche, portraying it in all its frequently painful sadness and also its brave and unflagging hope.
“Each story is told with clear, conscious prose. The sentences are strong, the words are all in the right order, and the details are clever. . . It becomes clear that Peter LaSalle might just be a master technician of story craft.” —American Book Review
Peter LaSalle is the author of several books of fiction, most recently the novel Mariposa's Song and a short story collection, Tell Borges If You See Him, recipient of the Flannery O'Connor Award in 2007. His stories have appeared in magazines and anthologies such as Paris Review, Tin House, Zoetrope, Yale Review, Antioch Review, Best American Short Stories, and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. He is a member of the creative writing faculty at the University of Texas at Austin.
Acknowledgments
1. What I Found Out About Her
2. In the Southern Cone
3. A Dream of Falling Asleep: IX–XVII
4. The Dealer’s Girlfriend
5. The Saga of the Irish in America
6. Additional Notes Concerning the Elevator in the Dictator’s Palace
7. The Manhattan Lunch: Two Versions
8. Tell Me About Nerval
9. Oh, Such Playwrights!
10. Tunis and Time
11. The Dead Are Dreaming About Us