Congratulations to Four Way Books author Eileen Pollack, author of the forthcoming In the Mouth , a collection of short-stories. Her story "The Bris" was selected by Stephen King and Heidi Pitlor for the Best American Short Stories 2008 , out now from Houghton Mifflin.
In the Mouth is due out in March 2008. “Eileen Pollack writes with great acuity, humor, and intelligent resignation about the various ways family love is called upon and revealed. This book is terrific company,” comments Lorrie Moore.
Taking on the hidden surfaces and interior worlds beneath any family unit, In the Mouth , is witty, affecting, and irresistible. These five stories and a novella are one moment light-hearted and the next tinged with sadness or frustration. In them, Pollack shows us how secrets that might sunder a family often become its strongest connection. Whether in the form of an unopened safe a family is selling in a yard sale, or a son realizing his father is guilty of murder, these stories investigate the nerve endings of human relationships. Pollack masterfully places the reader into her characters’ innermost worlds: we think their thoughts, feel their insecurities. “That reflection you see […] may be your own,” warns Rob Cohen, while Gish Jen applauds Pollack's work as “funny, rueful, wise stories, steeped in absurdity, pain, possibility -- the work of a writer who has lived.”
