Mending: New and Selected Stories

In Mending, Sallie Bingham follows the often brutal course of yearning and its disappointments with an emotional acuity both unflinching and vigilant. From the first assertions and compromises of sexuality-those accommodations that tug and chafe-to the constrictions of adulthood and, finally, the fixed contours of a maturity where need has been winnowed down, but so has our ability to accommodate, Bingham’s stories radiate with an honesty that is as insistent as it is compassionate. These stories, spanning a career of 50 years and ranging from the fecund Kentucky of her youth to the starker landscapes of New Mexico, have been called “sharp, elegant narratives” by Entertainment Weekly and “luminous” by Publishers Weekly. Taken together, they offer a vision of our inexhaustible hope that there might be a fitting home for the heart.

Read or download the story “Winter Term” courtesy of Sarabande Books.

Praise for Mending: New and Selected Stories:

“The layers of the unspoken in Bingham’s stories afford them the repleteness of novellas, belying their accessible surfaces, which are as absorbing as gossip. Why would a vegetarian shoot an elk? Why did the young novelist go stay alone with his wife’s sister on Nantucket? Why does the ambassador’s shy daughter stop feeling homesick in Paris? The stories couldn’t be more engaging, yet they arouse an oddly satisfying uneasiness that you’re missing something vital; no sooner do you finish reading one than you want to read it again. Their artistry is as hypnotic and unanalyzable as Roger Federer’s tennis. Selected from five decades’ work, these stories distill the mysterious glow that lives emanate as they recede into the past, and confirm Bingham’s place in the front rank of practitioners of this elusive genre.”

–The New Yorker

“Bingham’s work, including favorites such as “The Wedding” and “Sweet Peas,” remains sharp and deliciously unsettling, ripe for discovery by a new generation of readers.”

–Starred Review, Publishers Weekly

“This collection of new and selected stories spans work from 1967 to the present by an important writer who is too little known. These stories are remarkable for their economy of language and for the author’s ability, within a small frame, to allow the undefined but intense emotion of a central character (male or female, young or old) to sharpen in focus to the point at which both reader and character share the surprise of insight. In “August Ninth at Natural Bridge,” from Bingham’s 1972 collection, The Way It Is Now, a family’s traditional birthday outing becomes the setting for a girl’s seemingly typical teenage surliness to open out gradually into a terrifying understanding of sexual gamesmanship. These stories end with a stunning metaphoric resonance. In the more recent “Apricots,” for instance, a 63-year-old teacher allows herself to be seduced by a student helping her can apricots. Toward the end of the story, Bingham moves from action to recollection with the following sentence: “Later, Caroline remembered the flesh of the apricots, their slight graininess, the moisture that was not dripping like the sweetness of peaches but absorbed, contained.” VERDICT Like the fruit in “Apricots,” the stories in this rich collection are characterized by a ripeness of language and the graininess of surprising truths.”

–Library Journal

“Sallie Bingham’s characters scrutinize their relationships with children, lovers, and their own treacherous souls…. Nearly every one of these flinty stories is a tiny masterpiece.”

–Entertainment Weekly

“These engaging tales span landscape, gender, and age, and readers will treasure Bingham’s strikingly perceptive composition and refined, clever flashes of detail and clarity.”

–Booklist

“She has a poet’s eye for the significant incident. She has a playwright’s ear for dialogue. She has the essayist’s sense of a developing argument. These traits come to a wonderful fulfillment in her short fiction.”

–The Courier-Journal

Mending

New Stories

Found
Seagull
Selling The Farm
Heaven
Anywhere You Send Me

The Touching Hand (1967)

Winter Term
The Bank of the Ohio
The Ice Party

The Way It Is Now (1972)

August Ninth at Natural Bridge
The Wedding
Rachel’s Island

Transgressions (2002)

Apricots
Benjamin
The Hunt

Red Car (2008)

Red Car
Sagesse
Sweet Peas

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Posts mentioning Mending:

The Passion That Drives The Green Shoot Through The Flower: The Reason Many Women Take Writing Workshops

Posted: October 17th, 2011

A while back, or perhaps it was more than a few years ago, we all became aware of the epidemic of violence against women in this country, and memoirs began to be written as the survivors felt empowered to describe what they had gone though, battling through shame and the fear of family repercussions. We all have our lists of these titles, some of them bitingly effective, others less so, and perhaps I was not alone in imagining that writing about the problem would make the problem go away, or at least diminish it.  

In The Heart of the Heart of the Country

Posted: September 26th, 2011

My last reading—this month—in Kentucky was for another of what I call a dear audience, at the second floor library above the police station in the little outlying town of Prospect. Years ago this was a farming community; now, it has sprouted prosperous subdivisions, green with trees and grass, strip malls, gas stations—but also a small wildlife sanctuary, in easements, and residents who still remember the value of the land.  

The Dearest Audience

Posted: September 23rd, 2011

Now and then I have the privilege of reading to an audience I can only describe as dear. That was the case with the group at the Jeffersonville Public Library this evening: twenty or so people who hung on every word of my story, “Selling The Farm,” as though the two sisters in the story were their own friends, or even their own sisters.  

Hometown Reading: Carmichael’s Bookstore

Posted: September 21st, 2011

I always find that a reading in my hometown is both warmer and more disconcerting than reading in other cities, warmer, because so many old friends and relatives are sitting on the chairs at the back of the bookstore, disconcerting because they are old friends and relatives who do not view me first of all as a writer. Either they know too much about me, or not enough. They have come out of that mixture of kindness and curiosity—what we call support—that leaves me a little breathless, like a hearty slap on the back.  

Getting Ready to Teach and Read at the KY Women Writers Conference

Posted: September 14th, 2011

Like all authors, I face an interesting paradox when I travel to teach and read in my hometown—or, in this case, my home state.I am grateful that the hometown aura will bring in listeners, both to my class and to the reading I will give next Saturday.We are all curious about people who grew up near us, or are our age, or nearly, with the expectation of a shared point of view (and prejudices)—or at least shared experiences.  

After reading at the Alamosa Bookstore in Albuquerque, NM

Posted: September 13th, 2011

I’m always a little nervous before my first reading from a new book, so far untried by readers although with two wonderful reviews, some of my best (Library Journal, Publishers’ Weekly) but without the surge of comments that gathers slowly, in the media and in the form of email from strangers and friends, over a period of months.  

Getting Ready to Read: 48 Hours Ahead of Time

Posted: September 8th, 2011

Preparing to read from my new collection Mending: New and Selected Stories, at the Alamosa Bookstore in Albuquerque, New Mexico, goes beyond wondering who will be there, which is always impossible to predict.  