A professor finds a photograph of her deceased mother in a compromising position on the wall of an art museum. A twenty-something’s lucrative remote work sparks paranoia a, isolation, and bigotry. The summer after her divorce from an older man, an exiled painter’s former friends grapple with rumors she attempted to pass as a teenager. A twenty-something’s lucrative remote work sparks paranoia, isolation, and bigotry.
In this long-awaited debut collection, Kathleen Alcott turns her skills as a stylist on the unfreedoms of American life— as well as the guilt that stalks those who survive them. Emergency roams from New York to Nashville, European cities to scorched California towns, drug-smeared motel rooms to polished dinner parties, taking taut, surprising portraits snapshots of addiction, love, misogyny, and sexual power. Confronting the hidden perils of class ascension, the women in these stories try to pay down the psychic debts of their old lives as they search for a new happiness they can afford.
“[A] richly layered collection... Alcott's prose, both sensuous and cerebral, abounds with insight into people and the shapes life contorts them into.” New York Times Book Review
“In supple, self-assured prose, Alcott highlights the ambivalence that can come with intimacy and violence, asking whether love is merely another form of circumscription, and whether brutality can sometimes be an antidote to numbness.” The New Yorker
“ [Emergency] signals a remarkable stylistic sea change…its combination of structural complexity and expressive clarity mark a high point in this impressive author's evolution.” The Wall Street Journal
“If Alcott has always been interested in how people bargain with forces bigger than them, then Emergency is about what happens when women bet against themselves; when women use their own autonomy as a bargaining chip in a wager that might gain them some power within a system inherently built against them. Whatever they might gain—Helen’s bourgeois life, Hannah’s coupled bliss—can never make up for what they’ve already given up.” N + 1
“Alcott twines financial and feminine anxieties to create particular women wondering who they are if they live like this. It is seductive to read about money when it is neither the obvious, suffocating focus nor shrouded in euphemism. It is arresting to read about this female experience of capitalism, where that impossible quest for identity includes the perhaps impossible calculation of social standing.” Cleveland Review of Books
“Exquisite... Each of these seven stories--about unmoored women dealing with crises of identity, creeping despair, and the psychic wounds left by corrosive men--is a small marvel: intense, cerebral, and tender.” LitHub
“The world falls away as Kathleen Alcott’s stories unfold in her sublime collection… The smallest moment, the briefest description, the single telling detail are given the attention a stonecutter would give a gem. Alcott’s gift is breathtaking.” Hudson Review
“I've long loved Kathleen Alcott's novels for her whip-smart voice and her taut prose. I was delighted to discover that her collection of short stories, Emergency, is also wonderful, spiny and wry and thrumming with subversive power.” Lauren Groff
“Skillfully wrought and possessed of an exquisite eye for detail, this marvel of a collection contains enough insight and wisdom to fill several books. Kathleen Alcott proves again that she is one of her generation's sharpest and most gifted writers, with her hand over the beating heart of our complicated, crisis-ridden nation.” Alexandra Kleeman, author of Something New Under the Sun
“Kathleen Alcott’s Emergency left me windswept and altered—this is a book that reveals to us our forgotten joys and secrets, all the unexpected paths of our days. There is an abundance of the world here, a bright, haunted pulse you want to follow endlessly. Alcott is a mesmerizing writer, and this is her best book yet.” Paul Yoon, author of Run Me to Earth