Small in Real Life

Small in Real Life invokes the myth and melancholy of Southern California glamor, of starry-eyed women and men striving for their own Hollywood shimmer and the seamy undersides and luxurious mystique of the Golden State. Exiled to a Malibu rehab, an alcoholic paparazzo spies on his celebrity friend for an online tabloid. Down to her last dollar, a Hollywood hanger-on steals designer handbags from her dying friend’s bungalow. Blinded by grief, an LA judge atones after condescending to a failed actress on a date. When hunger for power, fame, and love betrays the senses, the characters in these nine stories must reckon with false choicesand their search for belonging with the wrong people. Small in Real Life offers an insider’s view of California and the golden promises of possibility and redemption that have long made the West glitter.

More Praise

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

Pittsburgh Quarterly

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

Tupelo Quarterly

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.

Debutiful

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

Hopkins Review

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

The Hudson Review

A gem of a collection.

Heavy Feather Review

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.

Deesha Philyaw, author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies and finalist for the National Book Award

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.

Garth Greenwell, author of Cleanness

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.

Bret Anthony Johnston, author of Remember Me Like This

In Kelly Sather’s phenomenal short story collection, she compresses the daily commotion of life into riveting moments of reckoning, whether earned or forced. Desire can obscure or illuminate, and in these compelling stories, Sather’s characters deal with the complications of wanting and existing in the world. Sentence by sentence, Small in Real Life is one of the best debuts I’ve ever read.

Michele Filgate, editor of What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About

Kelly Sather is a clear-eyed observer. These stories remind the readers of the thrills and dangers of living, and that we are never far from the undercurrent of human emotions, both mysterious and meaningful.

Yiyun Li, author of The Book of Goose

Table of Contents

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