Small in Real Life

Her writing points toward Raymond Carver’s gritty realism and Nathanael West’s satiric desperation.

Through each character’s desperate and reckless acts, we get a glimpse of heart.

The winner of the 2023 Drue Heinz Literature Prize, this story collection is a character-driven exploration set in Southern California. It’s soft and subtle with keen observations.

Sather’s decadent cast of characters may be more vividly mesmerizing in their sheer venality.

A lethal, electrifying sizzle unites the stories. Sather has mastered the recklessness that comes over people whose dreams are about to be smashed.

A gem of a collection.

This compact but mighty collection explores both the heights and depths of the unsavory business of being human. With exquisite, emotionally rich prose, every story surprises and unsettles. Tenderness coexists with terror, beauty alongside betrayal. Characters are at turns earnest and terrible as they grapple with longing, lust, grief, regret, and disappointment. The heart of this brilliant collection is chaos—the way the universe is chaotic, unpredictable, and simply dazzling.

Reading this very brilliant debut feels like holding a live wire, receiving a kind of shock our current literature seldom gives. It’s a shock we need. Kelly Sather’s characters, seeking escape from unbearable lives, are canny, naïve, cruel, bewildered, sometimes a little despicable, always entirely human—and utterly indifferent to our sympathy. Small in Real Life has a rare wisdom, born of freedom from illusions most of the rest of us can’t bear to let go of. This is among the most impressive new books of fiction I have read in years.

Small in Real Life is a heart-piercing and haunting debut. Kelly Sather is a writer possessed of rare courage—the courage to render our darkest tendencies and the last flicker of light we are terrified to lose. Each of these gorgeous, unflinching stories is the shard of a broken mirror, refracting pieces of our impossible lives, showing us what we’ve done and what we look like right now.