Mending: New and Selected Stories
(10/1/2011)
Fiction
In Mending, Sallie Bingham follows the often brutal course of yearning and its disappointments with an emotional acuity both unflinching and vigilant. … →
Fiction
Red Car
(2008)
Fiction
Forty-year veteran of the novel, noted feminist, and author of over ten books, Sallie Bingham returns with Red Car, a collection written in her signature style-discreet, sly prose circling taboo subjects. Her new offering is about love enjoyed, whether alone or with lovers, sensual or familial, comedic or tragic, often with a wry twist. In these twelve stories, … →
Nick of Time
(2006)
Fiction
Melanie is a dancer-the most unlikely dancer in the world, a woman who has had a hard life, waitressing, raising a son alone, putting up with an abusive husband. Late in life, she decides to pursue one dream, a dream she can’t afford, which her husband opposes: she will become a skilled ballroom dancer, moving to the old love songs that … →
Cory’s Feast
(2005)
Fiction
Cory is a middle-aged Easterner, long-divorced, energetic and fearlessly sensual. Pursuing a dream she has nursed for years, she moves to Taos, New Mexico and buys a famous old house and, in the tradition of its previous owner, turns it into a crucible for the transformation of her guests. Eccentric and charming, with a lover from the Pueblo and lots … →
Transgressions: Stories
(2002)
Fiction
In her wise and sexy collection, Sallie Bingham examines modern-day “transgressions” in affairs of the heart. She offers up a ménage à trois, an older woman’s affair with a student, a painter who uses his age as an excuse to behave indecorously. But the reader quickly discovers the real transgressions are those of the self against the self. In … →
Straight Man
(1996)
Fiction
Though the title of Bingham’s new novel suggests one half of a comedy team, the feelings of the protagonist, Louisville college professor Colby Winn, are no joke. When Colby picks up hitchiker Ann Lee Crabtree, his initial interest in the free-spirited woman almost immediately becomes obsessive. To his friends, particularly I. and Martha Weekly, who are … →
Matron of Honor
(1994)
Fiction
As in her previous novels, Bingham concerns herself with family relationships, and in many ways revisits the tensions of her own well-known Kentucky clan, which she chronicled in the nonfiction Passion and Prejudice . This muted yet powerful narrative is her best yet, as she captures a prominent Kentucky family, the Masons, at their most vulnerable. … →
Upstate
(1993)
Fiction
A woman’s obsession drives an affair out of control, violating social contracts and devastating the people in its path. For years, Ann and David shared weekends and holidays with country friends Flora and Edwin, even after womanizing Edwin took Ann away to pick grapes and started a year-long affair. The ground rules were clear from the … →
Small Victories
(1993)
Fiction
Southern gothic touches lace this dark, portentous story of family lies revealed and grievances redressed. In Passion & Prejudice, Bingham described the bitter conflicts that beset several generations of her own family, which owned the Louisville Courier-Journal. She sets this, her second novel, in a small North Carolina town circa 1958. Louise, the elder of two … →
The Way It Is Now
(1972)
Fiction
In the fifteen stories collected in The Way It Is Now, girlhood, love, sexual initiation, motherhood, and middle age are played out in cauterizing dramas against a variety of background settings. Growth is often forced rather than chosen, and the joys of maturity gleam and vanish. In “August Ninth at Natural Bridge,” a young girl is made … →
