New Day Tuesday: You Should Pity Us Instead by Amy Gustine

This week’s New Day Tuesday release, Amy Gustine’s You Should Pity Us Instead, is a compilation of short stories being recognized as a “dazzling debut collection” by Publisher’s Weekly. The stories include an assortment of ordinary situations: a women with fifty-five cats, a father on his way to sort out his dead daughter’s apartment, a mother with an unconsolable baby. Kirkus Review says, “It might be easy to mistake these stories, with their focus on the familiar, for quiet ones.” However, their power is in the way the characters organically create themselves on the page and compel us to examine the all too familiar pain and struggle of everyday life. Celebrated short story author and novelist, Karen Russell, says, “Gustin excels at dramatizing the cunning of the human animal—a creature renowned for its skill at self-sabatoge—as well as celebrating the freakish grace that can sometimes strike an ordinary life.”

Published by Sarabande Books, find these stories about family, motherhood, God, mortality, and more on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or at an indie bookstore today.