Ether Seven Stories and a Novella [Paperback]

ANew York Times Book ReviewEditors' Choice

All the characters in Evgenia Citkowitz's first collection of short fiction are connected by the quest for identitysome are poised at crossroads, while others teeter on the edge of a moral precipice. In Leavers' Events, a teenage girl awaits exam results and has a sexual encounter with a teacher that she hopes will define her. In Sunday's Child, a middle-aged actress evicts a homeless woman from her garden, precipitating a crisis of conscience. And in the title novella, Ether, a blocked writer plagiarizes his own life with devastating consequences.

Unexpected and startlingly original, Citkowitz depicts her characters with a mordant humor and tenderness that never diminishes their complexity.

Citkowitz flouts expectations&.She doesn't sound like anyone else you'll have read in a very long while. The New York Times

How coolly poised, Evgenia Ciktowitz's prose! And how elegantly and richly detailed her fictional worlds! It's something of a shock then to realize that in this debut collection the young author is depicting individuals devastated by emotion, if not decorticated, numbed . . . sharply observed, resolutely unsentimental, and wholly engaging. Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Review of Books

Comprised of seven stories and a novella&[Citkowitz] emerges as a master of both forms. Hilton Als, The New Yorker

Although Citkowitz trawls familiar territory, what she does with this material is unexpected and often startling. . . The kind of imaginative leap you expect in a poem, it gives an otherwise slight story a small radiance. . . Citkowitz has an impressive literary pedigree: her mother was the novelist Lady Caroline Blackwood, her stepfather the poet Robert Lowell. But her voice, particularly her rhythm--half staccato, half headlong rush--is wholly her own. She doesn't sound like anyone else you'll have read in a very long while. Ligaylã7