WINNER, PRESS 53 AWARD FOR SHORT FICTION
Employing a dazzling range of styles and subject matters, the ten stories in Missing Persons offer glimpses into the lives of ordinary people facing out-of-the-ordinary problems. A street sweeper sends coded messages that a young couple is compelled to decipher. A woman becomes smitten with a living statue. A divorced dad finds himself with an unwanted house guest, after his online date goes wrong. Including speculative, historical, contemporary, and flash pieces, the collection grapples in surprising and illuminating ways with themes of disappearance and loss.
PRAISE
“Inventive, magical, compelling, and strange in just the way life and people are strange. Stephanie Carpenter is a rare and wonderful talent.”
—George Saunders, author of Tenth of December: Stories and Lincoln in the Bardo
“Sometimes what’s missing is best unfound. Missing Persons, the remarkable debut story collection by Stephanie Carpenter, illuminates the loss of a father due to mental illness, an aloof living statue, a city that takes things away, a 19th century philanderer who doesn’t recognize his lost daughter, not to mention a giant poodle named Saucepan. The aching feminism of ‘Trial Watchers’ vies with the sorry history of a lover’s dead mother in ‘Inheritance.’ Always mellifluous, Carpenter has an Alice Munro facility to ’embed more than announce.’ But here’s the announcement: Missing Persons achieves a deep and timely look into the void.”
—Terese Svoboda, author of Anything That Burns You: A Portrait of Lola Ridge, Radical Poet
“Stephanie Carpenter’s protagonists are mostly from socioeconomic backgrounds that teach them the need to brace themselves for what’s to come, and while they want to believe that things aren’t as bad with their loved ones present, they’re also aware that they have no way of knowing. These stories are piercingly smart on how unsettling our everyday intimacies can be, and heartening in their faith in our responsibility to always make sure that we’ve nevertheless done what we could.”
—Jim Shepard, author of The Book of Aron and The World to Come
“Stephanie Carpenter’s stories display a wealth of quirky characters, difficult situations of their own making, and astonishing falls from grace, related with meticulous prose and an eye for the telling detail. Endings surprise without gimmicks, dialogue manages to be simultaneously sharp and awkward, and the results satisfy and trouble us in equal measure. Missing Persons marks the beginning of an exciting career.”
—Thomas C. Foster, author of How to Read Literature Like a Professor
“The stories in Carpenter’s extraordinary debut collection contain both the wickedly smart and the downright wicked. She can send a shiver down the spine, a punch to the gut, and a tap to the heart, often in the same story. She’s a major talent, capable of stories that are not just unsettling, but edge-of-your-seat suspenseful..”
—Caitlin Horrocks, author of This Is Not Your City
“An urban angel. A Victorian philanderer. A dystopian word game with murky origins. An online dating relationship gone horribly wrong. These sharp, distinctive stories hit the sweet spot between realism and allegory. Readers will be won over by Carpenter’s dry wit and the almost mathematical precision of her language, tools she employs, with great artistry, to unearth surprising emotional states.”
—Trudy Lewis, author of The Empire Rolls
“Stories so accomplished it’s hard to believe this is a debut collection. Ranging from contemporary dilemmas to a historical piece about a drunken father’s missing daughter, these are beautifully written and tightly wound pieces about relationships of all kinds going or already gone wrong, about genuinely human struggles. Carpenter approaches a series of very different lives with merciless and clear-eyed empathy, and reveals them warts and all.”
—Brian Evenson, author of A Collapse of Horses
“Carpenter does people in trouble really well. They are aggrieved, scared, wary, and missing in ways that intrigue from start to finish.”
—Fiona Maazel, author of A Little More Human
Stephanie Carpenter 