A Private State (Awp Award for Short Fiction)

The devil is in the details, as the old saying goes, and certainly the women who populate Charlotte Bacon's collection of short stories, A Private State, would agree. The lives these women lead are not the stuff of epic tragedy--instead, the distance between spouses is measured in the disappearance of the family dog; the fate of a pregnancy is decided during a whale-watching expedition. There are no fiery emotional explosions, no grand epiphanies. Bacon limns subtle stories of women who move through the physical world in search of answers they can only find within themselves. Whether it is one character's attempt to anchor herself in a shared past with her sister following the death of their mother, or another's efforts to suspend her anxiety about the future by losing herself in the buoyancy of water as she swims laps, Bacon defines small moments that build eventually to a greater awareness, if not always a happy ending, for her quiet pilgrims.