Better Times: Short Stories - Paperback

by Sara Batkie (Author)

Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, the stories in Better Times focus on what's happening in places people don't think to look. Women, sometimes displaced, often lonely, are at the heart of these stories. In Better Times Sara Batkie focuses on the moments in women's lives when the wider world is wrapped up in other matters: a father and daughter, separated by time and an ocean, dreaming of each other; a girl in a home for "troubled women" imagining the journey of the first dog in space; a phantom breast returning to haunt a woman after her mastectomy; a young woman giving birth to a litter of eggs. Such are the ordinary women weathering extraordinary circumstances in Better Times.

Divided into three sections covering the recent past, our current era, and the world to come, the stories gathered here--with characters stymied by loneliness, motherhood, illness, even cataclysmic climate change--interrogate the idea that so-called better times ever existed, particularly for women.

Author Biography

Sara Batkie was born in Seattle and raised in the wilds of Connecticut and Iowa. Her stories have been published in various journals, received mention in the 2011 Best American Short Stories anthology, and honored with a 2017 Pushcart Prize. Currently she lives in Brooklyn and works in Manhattan as the Writing Programs Director for the Center for Fiction.