Goodnight, Beautiful Women - Hardcover

by Anna Noyes (Author)

This is an extraordinary book of stories. Many of the characters are anchored to coastal Maine, but a particular quality of wildness animates nearly all of them. The stories are energetic, often mysterious, and beautifully written, and they will stay in your memory long after you finish the book.--Charles Baxter

Moving along the Maine Coast and beyond, the interconnected stories in Goodnight, Beautiful Women bring us into the sultry, mysterious inner lives of New England women and girls as they navigate the dangers and struggles of their outer worlds. With novelistic breadth and a quicksilver emotional intelligence, Noyes explores the ruptures and vicissitudes of growing up and growing old, and shines a light on our most uncomfortable impulses while masterfully charting the depths of our murky desires.

A woman watches her husband throw one by one their earthly possessions into the local quarry, before vanishing himself; two girls from very different social classes find themselves deep in the throes of a punishing affair; a motherless teenager is sexually awakened in the aftermath of a local trauma; and a woman's guilt from a childhood lie about her intellectually disabled cousin reverberates into her married years.

Dark and brilliant, rhythmic and lucid, Goodnight, Beautiful Women marks the arrival of a fearless and unique new young voice in American fiction.

Author Biography

Anna Noyes is a recent graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her fiction has appeared in VICE, A Public Space, and Guernica, amongst others. She has received the Aspen Words Emerging Writer Fellowship and the James Merrill House Fellowship, and has served as writer-in-residence at the Polli Talu Arts Center in Estonia. Goodnight, Beautiful Women, received the 2013 Henfield Prize for Fiction.