Kelly Sather is the author of a new story collection titled Small in Real Life.
The title refers to the ways that our perspective might be skewed by our expectations.
Southern California is the setting for most of the stories. That’s a place that is often mythologized. But as we see in these nine stories, people are just people, even in California—even in Hollywood. The characters in these stories yearn and search and lose—but always continue to seek to find.
The characters give in to illusions about the place and continue to dream and scheme and aspire to a life that is just out of reach–still with the trappings of living large.
And while it may be that their many whims and schemes are aspirational, they soon find that reality–real life–can be just as desirable as something smaller. When they face their own real lives, California is not so glittery. It is a smaller, darker, maybe more mysterious space that they come to understand they still yearn for and fight for.
Kelly Sather is the recipient of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize for the story collection, 'Small in Real Life.'
