Girl Trouble

Stories

By Holly Goddard Jones
(Harper Perennial, Paperback, 9780061776304, 368pp.)

Publication Date: August 13, 2009

Categories: Short Stories (single author)

Selected by Indie Booksellers for the October 2009 Indie Next List

Holly Goddard Jones's stories have appeared in New Stories from the South, Best American Mystery Stories, and various literary journals. She is an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and the winner of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award.

"Holly Goddard Jones is blessed with wisdom beyond her years, a gimlet eye, and an enviable literary talent; her debut collection, GIRL TROUBLE, is a fierce and exhilarating achievement."
-Claire Messud, author of The Emperor's Children

"Jones writes with grace and ease, the selections adding up to a powerful sum of reflection, loss and regret."
-Publishers Weekly

"The stories glow with intelligent empathy. . . . The beauty of these stories (and they are exhilarating) stems from how deeply we're pulled into this complex world, nudged to recognize the thin line between missed opportunity and despair, inarticulate love and loss."
-O magazine

"No politician should ever again use the phrase 'The American People' without reading this book, preferably twice, so that they understand at last just who the hell they're talking about. Holly Goddard Jones has a voice as expansive, complex, and beautiful as the country itself."
-Joshua Ferris, author of Then We Came to the End

"Jones' sparkling debut collection zeroes in on lonely searching souls making do in a quiet Kentucky town."
-People

"A grand debut of a writer who is assured, sensitive, and wonderfully skillful. . . . A marvelous work of heartbreaking wisdom."
-Edward P. Jones

"GIRL TROUBLE is a powerful, resonant short story collection from the uniquely talented Holly Goddard Jones."
-George Pelecanos

"Poignant and approachable-ripe for any audience. The human touch and prairie isolation of her characters are pitch perfect. . . . Jones' prose is also sharply intellectual. With a debut as striking as Girl Trouble, Jones could very well join the tradition of America's great Southern writers."
-New York Press

"Girl Trouble resonates with black-coal sorrow and dark truths found in [Jones's] native state's darkest hollers. . . . Nothing is contrived; every story is steeped in reality, and clarity comes with a price."
-The Nashville Scene

"Powerful . . . Strong, subtly nuanced."
-The News & Observer

"This masterful debut dramatizes the fortitude of small-town southerners confronting situations gone terribly wrong and the shadowed boundaries of love, morality, and violence. . . . Jones' seemingly effortless style makes the eight tales quietly powerful and achingly human."
-Booklist

"The stories from Girl Trouble are poignant and approachable-ripe for any audience. The human touch and prairie isolation of her characters are pitch-perfect. . . . Sharply intellectual. With a debut as striking as Girl Trouble, Jones could very well join the tradition of America's great Southern writers."
-Las Vegas Weekly