Virgin and Other Stories

by April Ayers Lawson

Overview

One of The Irish Times "Best debuts of 2017"

One of New York Magazine's "45 New Books to Read This Fall"

One of The Millions' "Most Anticipated" for the second half of 2016

One of The Huffington Post's "20 New Books You'll Need For Your Shelf in Fall 2016"

One of The Boston Globe's "most anticipated" for Fall 2016

One of Bookriot's "16 Books to Read This Fall"

One of Harper's Bazaar's "16 Books You Need to Read in November"

Set in the American South, at the crossroads of a world that is both secular and devoutly Christian, April Ayers Lawson’s stories mine the inner lives of young women and men navigating sexual, emotional, and spiritual awakenings. In the title story, Jake grapples with the growing chasm between him and his wife, Sheila, who was a virgin when they wed. In “Three Friends in a Hammock” the tension and attraction is palpable between three sexy, insecure young women as they tug and toe the rope of their shared sack. “The Way You Must Play Always” invites us into the mind of Gretchen, young-looking even for thirteen, as she attends her weekly piano lesson, anxiously anticipating her illicit meeting with Wesley, her instructor’s adult brother who is recovering from a brain tumor. Conner, the cynical sixteen-year-old narrator of “The Negative Effects of Homeschooling,” escorts his mink-wearing mother to the funeral of her best friend, Charlene, a woman who was once a man. And in “Vulnerability” we accompany a young married painter to New York City, lured there by an art dealer and one of his artists. Both are self-involved and have questionable intentions, but nevertheless she is enticed.

Nodding to the Southern Gothic but channeling an energy all its own, Virgin and Other Stories is a mesmerizing debut from an uncannily gifted young writer. With self-assurance and sensuality, April Ayers Lawson unravels the intertwining imperatives of intimacy—sex and love, violation and trust, spirituality and desire—eyeing, unblinkingly, what happens when we succumb to temptation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250141231
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	11/07/2017
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

April Ayers Lawson is the recipient of the George Plimpton Award for Fiction, as well as a writing fellowship from The Corporation of Yaddo. "Virgin" was also named a favorite short story of the year by Flavorwire Magazine and anthologized in The Unprofessionals: New American Writing From The Paris Review. Her fiction has appeared in the Norwegian version of Granta, Oxford American, Vice, ZYZZYVA, Crazyhorse, and Five Chapters, among others. She has lectured in the Creative Writing Department at Emory University, and is the 2016-2017 Kenan Visiting Writer at University Of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Table of Contents

CONTENTS

1. Virgin 1

2. Three Friends in a Hammock 35

3. The Way You Must Play Always 43

4. The Negative Effects of Homeschooling 77

5. Vulnerability 109

Acknowledgments 177

Editorial Reviews

"Fans of Jamie Quatro’s I Want to Show You More will be drawn to Lawson’s lyric, expansive dramatizations of Southern evangelical Christians, as she straddles the intersection of sexuality and faith. Her sentences, so sharp, are meant to linger." –The Millions

"A tremendous intelligence paradoxically amplified by being constrained by intense emotion; Lawson is a distinctive, and extraordinary, writer." —Rivka Galchen, author of Little Labors

"April Ayers Lawson is one of the boldest young writers alive. Reckless and brave, Virgin and

Other Stories swirls with characters who emotionally shape-shift through complicated worlds of sexuality, anticipation, and guilt. This is a book where each action and emotion means three things at once and where characters bleed into one another like strange, cut-up puzzles. It's a book asking you to look into its eyes, even if you know this look will lead only to disaster. But go ahead. Stare even. It's what you want anyway." —Scott McClanahan, author of Crapalachia and Hill William

"The stories in Virgin are sensual, and smart, and theologically informed—but what I find most captivating is the refined elegance of the prose itself. Like Virginia Woolf and Samantha Harvey, Lawson renders her fine, often painfully precise details in a lyric, near-transcendent voice. She probes, without fear or inhibition, the deepest psychologies of her characters, holding their feet to the proverbial fire while never losing sight of the fact that what makes them characters are the small, specific moments of embodiment: two naked legs touching, the way a man cuffs his sleeves, an intense sexual violation—the little corks marking a vast submerged net, as Woolf would say. Virgin is an important, immersive work by a young writer on the cusp of what I predict will be a tidal wave career." —Jamie Quatro, author of I Want to Show You More

"April Ayers Lawson renders complete portraits of sexual relationships, from start to finish, in a way that is fully honest and brave and even occasionally shameless, in the highest sense. Fearless, bold, these stories are entertaining contemporary classics." —Amie Barrodale, author of You Are Having a Good Time

"['Virgin' is] an astonishment. All sex and brains and feeling. And it's funny too." –Lorin Stein, TheEconomist.com

From the Publisher

…[a] confident debut collection…"The Way You Must Play Always" best expresses Ms. Lawson's themes about the vexing nature of sexual curiosity. In that story, a 13-year-old girl named Gretchen takes piano lessons that she resents at a local teacher's house, interested mostly in the teacher's mysterious ailing brother, who rarely leaves the room in which he's convalescing. She pays him illicit visits, and their relationship is unnerving and well described, like all the best parts of this book.

The New York Times - John Williams

★ 09/12/2016
The five stories in Lawson’s superb debut collection explore youth in extremis, through voices at once elegant in their phrasing and unrestrained in their emotion. In the title story, a young husband suspects his emotionally unavailable wife of infidelity, only to find himself tempted by the same at a society party. “The Way You Must Play Always” recalls the power dynamics of Carson McCullers’s “Wunderkind,” detailing a teenage piano student’s infatuation with her instructor’s sickly homebound brother. “Three Friends in a Hammock” measures the growing interpersonal distances among three longtime friends who reunite at a birthday party. A boy wrestles with his mother’s complicated relationship with a recently deceased transgender woman in “The Negative Effects of Homeschooling,” and, in the collection’s longest and most freewheeling story, “Vulnerability,” a talented painter contemplates and eventually consummates an affair with a peculiar but charming art dealer. The precision of Lawson’s prose brilliantly contrasts with the messy inner lives of her characters. These are stories that dare to tread where they shouldn’t, on uncertain ground that feels, in the hands of this talented young writer, remarkably concrete. Agent: Rebecca Nagel, the Wylie Agency. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

09/01/2016
In Lawson's lengthy closing piece, "Vulnerability," a young artist confesses to her dealer that the disturbing figures she draws or paints resemble the man who abused her as a child. Later, caught in a triangle with the dealer and the mysterious H., she muses on "men whose powers of observation and inner tension suffuse the air." That tension, that acute observation, that sense of damaged and damaging sexuality all suffuse Lawson's accomplished stories. In "The Way You Must Play Always," a teenager condemned to the rigors of piano lessons after being caught fooling around with her older cousin wreaks havoc when she boldly approaches her teacher's seriously ill brother. In the title piece, a Plimpton Prize winner actually somewhat less successful than the other tautly strung and full-bodied stories here, a woman abused as a child fears sex with her new husband. VERDICT For all fiction readers.

Library Journal

2016-08-16
Debut collection limns a variety of troubled characters searching for solace of both sexual and spiritual varieties in the contemporary South.The title story investigates the frustrations of Jake, who learns after they marry that his young wife, Sheila, was manipulated into “heavy petting” by an uncle when she was 12 and then, when they were caught, blamed for it by her conservative Christian parents, who afterward considered their daughter damaged goods. Though this trauma seems to have permanently turned her off sex, Jake still fears that Sheila is cheating on him, while he is tempted by a wealthy cancer survivor who's a major donor to the hospital where he works. This is the first of several lurid scenarios that could have devolved into standard-issue Southern Gothic but instead convey compassion for Lawson’s damaged protagonists in straightforward but sharply perceptive prose. Teenagers roiled by sexual desire drive the action in “The Way You Must Play Always” and “The Negative Effects of Homeschooling,” and they are surrounded by adults equally confused and unhappy. Indeed, it might have made more thematic sense for the collection to take its name from “Vulnerability,” the closing and longest piece; that title pinpoints an essential human quality on abundant display here. In that story, Lawson takes the first-person narrator, a painter, to New York to meet a famous artist and an art dealer who for all their sophistication are as needy as the husband she left back in her Southern hometown drinking scotch and watching porn in a backyard shed. Faltering marriages, uneasy connections to fundamentalist religious backgrounds, and the gray areas where powerful teenage sexuality meets adult desire in relationships that may or may not constitute abuse—these are among the recurrent subjects handled frankly yet with a delicate touch. Meaty, satisfying tales of a substance that suggests Lawson would make a fine novelist.

Kirkus Reviews