Lost on Purpose: Women in the City

By Amy Prior

A new collection of stories about women living in the city includes tales of first love in Beijiing and trouble on the Mexican-American border near San Diego, with stories by Elizabeth Graver, Tara... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1580051200
• ISBN13: 9781580051200
• Release Date: January 2005
• Publisher: Seal Press
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.66 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 0.8" x 5.5"

Customer Reviews

Worthy Collection

Amy Prior has gotten a good bunch of writers together in this city-based anthology, and she's given them their head in terms of allowing raw explorations of sexuality and citizenship. Among the many women writers here a few are very well known, and some of the others are bona fide up and comers, but few people could possibly be familiar with all of the contributors, so it's nice to see a book in which new writers are rubbing shoulders with the established masters of the short story, such as Amy Hempel. In fact the whole enterprise has the natrual vitality you get when Bennington is the center of the literary universe. The contributors' notes in the back of the book are helpful in this regard, although I was surprised to see that one of the writers, Gail Louise Siegel, either has no Bennington affiliations or has so many items on her resume she's skipping that one in her CV. But I could have sworn she, of all of the people, had the real Bennington flava here with the magically ironic, "Double Cutaway." One of my very favorite young writers, Trinie Dalton, contributes a touching story about the revenants who drift through Echo Park (LA), a story that wrenches the heart with its delicate and wraithy instincts. Devika Mehra is a startling writer with huge talents, total command of physical and sensual detail and an agreeably cynical attitude towards romance. Her story "The Garden," laid in Bombay, is maybe the best piece in the whole anthology. Well, what's "the best" is a matter of taste, isn't it, all I can say is, it is one of the stories in LOST ON PURPOSE that reverberated most for me. Tara Ison, author of "Timing," tells the kind of novel-in-miniature that Ward Just became famous for doing: from a woman's perspective this tale of Washingtonian and erotic politics and diplomacy reads as positively revolutionary. The problem is that many of the stories are told in the first person and too often these first persons sort of sound alike, the questioning young woman on the brink of a crisis of identity or entitlement, buffeted like Veronica Mars by a pack of cute but heartless boys. Even the title sounds a little coy, heralding a new age of willed, chic confusion like its predecessor, Sofia Coppola's LOST IN TRANSLATION.

you'll love these metropolitan lives

Keep this one by your bedside, ladies, and dip into it when you're dateless or hubby's snoring. I especially liked Emily Carter's "Glory B and the Gentle Art," about an old boyfriend's "amazing" new girlfriend; Elizabeth Graver's adolescent best girlfriends who have a crush--on each other ("What Kind of Boy"); and Gail Louise Siegel's "Double Cutaway"--a woman, a man, and a guitar. A lovely, funny, riveting collection.

Spirited New Collection

I thoroughly enjoyed all of the stories in this collection. This is the perfect book for women livin' in the city.