Please join us on Saturday, February 8 at 7 PM when we welcome Sadie Hoagland to City Books. Refreshments will be served.
Hoagland’s new collection of short stories, American Grief in Four Stages explores the possibility of elegy and the inability of our culture to communicate grief or sympathy outside of cliche. The book asks the question: why does our country do so little for the bereaved? Why do we have only empty cliché to address the grief of others? Why do we expect people to just “get over” insurmountable tragedy?
Hoagland is based in Louisiana. She has a PhD in fiction from the University of Utah and an MA in Creative Writing/Fiction from UC Davis. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Alice Blue Review, The Black Herald, Mikrokosmos Journal, South Dakota Review, Sakura Review, Grist Journal, Oyez Review, Passages North, Five Points, The Fabulist, South Carolina Review and elsewhere. She is a former editor of Quarterly West, and currently teaches fiction at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
Reviews:
“Hoagland is adept at showing the minuscule and almost imperceptible ways that life changes after a traumatic event….This remarkable collection, capturing all these varied experiences of loss and grief, ends up providing a shared language and understanding.”
-Emily Webber, in Necessary Fiction
“A captivating debut collection…assured, haunting, and deeply empathetic.”
–Kirkus Reviews, starred review
“Terrifyingly true and dangerously perceptive, Sadie Hoagland’s provocative fictions deliver us to moments of maximum chaos.” –Melanie Rae Thon, author of Silence and Song