Wife with Knife

"This collection is her best ever." AMY TAN

Wife with Knife is a collection of quick and quirky short stories, that are an utter delight and winner of the Leapfrog Global Fiction Prize 2020

"Molly Giles' stories have always been among my favorites since I first read her work thirty-seven years ago. This collection is her best ever. What an irreverent, original voice! I found myself gasping in shock and laughter, feeling at the end of each tale that I had garnered strange wisdom on the human heart and its unerring sense for finding trouble."--Amy Tan, author of The Joy Luck Club

The speakers in Molly Giles's Wife With Knife offer their truths with surprising starkness: "[T]he actual heart looks more like a tongue than a valentine" states the grief-flayed aunt of "Agate Beach," while the careless driver of "Accident" thinks "If I rear-ended anyone in California, I might be sued or shot but I would not be prayed upon." Many of the stories are not traditional narratives but glimpses of the trouble or healing that lies ahead: teens refusing to heed traffic, lovers staring down death and betrayal and closure. Like a street magician's trick, Wife With Knife holds out each everyday tragedy or quiet triumph only to replace it seamlessly with another.

Author: Molly Giles
Publisher: Leapfrog Press
Published: 11/16/2021
Pages: 208
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.60lbs
Size: 8.90h x 5.95w x 0.50d
ISBN13: 9781948585293
ISBN10: 1948585294
BISAC Categories:
- Fiction | Short Stories (single author)
- Fiction | Literary
- Fiction | Women

About the Author
I always wanted to write but as a single mother supporting three girls I found it difficult to find the time. I took a correspondence course in short story writing from UC Berkeley, which led to a summer scholarship at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers. When a friend lent me the $75 needed for tuition, I enrolled in writing classes at San Francisco State University. I finished my undergraduate courses at night and began an MA in Creative Writing. Asked to step in for a professor who had fallen ill, I spent the next 35 years teaching fiction workshops, first in San Francisco and later at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. During this time, I published three collections of short stories, a novel, a chapbook of flash fictions, an e-book, and countless book reviews. I also mentored and edited the novels of Amy Tan. My first collection, Rough Translations (U. of Georgia Press) won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, the Boston Globe Award, and the Bay Area Book Award. My second collection, Creek Walk and Other Stories (Papier Mache Press) won the Small Press Award for Fiction and the San Francisco Commonwealth Club's Silver Medal for Fiction. My chapbook, Bothered, won The Split Oak Award. My third collection, All the Wrong Places, won the Spokane Prize for Short Fiction. My novel, Iron Shoes (Simon and Schuster) didn't win anything. I've been the lucky recipient of an NEA, the National Circle of Book Critics Award for Book Reviewing, and several fellowships at MacDowell and Yadoo. My stories have been published in the Pushcart Prize collections (twice) and in the O.Henry (once) and in many anthologies and textbooks. I am presently retired from teaching and live in Northern California. I have just finished a memoir of flash fictions based on my life spent crossing and re-crossing the Golden Gate Bridge and I am working on a historical novel set in Hawaii.