20:I[5421,["https://dlhg59ksjeb0y.cloudfront.net/_next/static/chunks/32wlomrwrmrkt.js","https://dlhg59ksjeb0y.cloudfront.net/_next/static/chunks/3_m036uulyk24.js","https://dlhg59ksjeb0y.cloudfront.net/_next/static/chunks/3vyhf5n3zugq3.js","https://dlhg59ksjeb0y.cloudfront.net/_next/static/chunks/11tga8gv621-f.js","https://dlhg59ksjeb0y.cloudfront.net/_next/static/chunks/2ureo05iszfhx.js","https://dlhg59ksjeb0y.cloudfront.net/_next/static/chunks/00pn5b4f33zqj.js","https://dlhg59ksjeb0y.cloudfront.net/_next/static/chunks/2yz0gl-3dg51y.js"],"default"] 21:T4a7,

Named a Fall Pick by Boston Globe, ELLE, Library Journal and MyDomain

An eerie debut collection featuring missing parents, unrequited love, and other uncomfortable moments

A man hangs from the ceiling of an art gallery. A woman spells out messages to her sister using her own hair. Children deemed “bad” are stolen from their homes. In Hardly Children, Laura Adamczyk’s rich and eccentric debut collection, familiar worlds—bars, hotel rooms, cities that could very well be our own—hum with uncanny dread.

The characters in Hardly Children are keyed up, on the verge, full of desire. They’re lost, they’re in love with someone they shouldn’t be, they’re denying uncomfortable truths using sex or humor. They are children waking up to the threats of adulthood, and adults living with childlike abandon.

With command, caution, and subtle terror, Adamczyk shapes a world where death and the possibility of loss always emerge. Yet the shape of this loss is never fully revealed. Instead, it looms in the periphery of these stories, like an uncomfortable scene viewed out of the corner of one’s eye.

22:T4e5,

A woman spills the story of her life to a bar full of strangers, in the acerbic first novel from Laura Adamczyk.

Anything can become the story of your life if you let it, and I suppose this became mine.

In Island City, a wry, wistful woman, estranged from her family, sells her belongings and moves back to her hometown in the Midwest. To her, it’s the “perfect place to give up.” She wants to get rid of everything—her stuff, her ambitions. Before making a “messy exit,” she holes up in a dark bar and tells her stories to an audience of indifferent strangers. There’s the time the river dried up and you could walk across its bed; the day her sister got clobbered at the nursing home; when her dad got cancer, then Alzheimer’s, then cancer again. Now she’s forgetting things the way he did, words slipping away. That third drink isn’t helping.

Laura Adamczyk, whose writing is “super weird” and “super unsettling” (Eugenia Williamson, The Boston Globe), creates a full portrait of a person, even as the image blurs and fades. Delivered as a booze-soaked monologue, Island City is a funny, devastating first novel, one that bristles and burns with true feeling.

Books By Laura Adamczyk (2 Books)

Hardly Children

Island City

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