"Sender shifts between stories of love-between lovers, friends, family, ghosts-and the great looming shadow of the Holocaust, making a deep and howling portrait of longing and loneliness."
Boston Globe
"Sender's willingness to explore primal hurts makes her fiction compelling. . . . A distinctive debut from a promising author."
Kirkus Reviews
"Sender's intimate worlds explore the hollows of the real and imagined, bringing to life emotions and connections too unwieldy to define or restrain."
Booklist
"A stunner from the very first page."
Deesha Philyaw, author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, in the Millions
"A profound and deeply funny examination of loneliness in many of its forms."
Emma Copley Eisenberg in Electric Lit
"This book is fierce. This book is rowdy. This book makes you think about all the relationships in your life that have not panned out as you might have hoped."
Barrelhouse
"Brooding, poignant. . . . The sharp humor and imagination in these stories helps to temper the aching loneliness of people who are in various phases of losing, rejecting, or longing for love."
Foreword Reviews
"Courtney Sender hooks us with her singular magic. . . . Brilliantly aching and haunting."
Sara Lippmann, Lilith blog
"Sender matches the light topic of youthful lost love with the extreme heft of the Holocaust . . . and comes up with a miraculous balance between the personal and the universal."
Ann Patchett, author of The Dutch House
"Wholly original, lyrical, fierce, these stories confound expectations at every turn. Courtney Sender writes about passion and loneliness, faith and longing, heaven and hell with a clear eye and a compassionate wit. This collection expands and celebrates, even as it sometimes upends, what it means to tell a love story."
Alice McDermott, author of The Ninth Hour
"Courtney Sender's stories are fierce and tender, exploring the urgency of desire, the restlessness of longing, and the way that both trauma and the will to survive can be a haunting inheritance. Sender moves gracefully between the surreal and the everyday, capturing the way romantic love can be at once impossibly strange and mercifully familiar."
Danielle Evans, author of The Office of Historical Corrections
"Trust is the soul of these stories, and it flows both ways: the trust Courtney Sender has in her reader and the trust the reader feels deeply and truly in the hands of such a generous, intelligent, offbeat, singular writer. These stories, structured in an utterly original way, are rare and real; they get under your skin."
Elisa Albert, author of Human Blues
"Reading these stories is like hearing a series of songs you love-the rhythm, the feeling, the physicality, the words! Literary rock 'n' roll."
Aimee Bender, author of The Butterfly Lampshade
