Book of Exemplary Women

"Diana Xin's debut story collection, Book of Exemplary Women, brings the pleasure of discovering a new voice-a fresh and original voice. One hears it immediately in the intonation of her witty, economical prose. These unpredictable, imaginative stories have to keep up with the fleet pacing with which they are told. And they do. There's a lightness to the touch that makes the emotional charge of each story still more deeply satisfying. And there's a sense of intimacy to the telling, an inner voice that shares the secrets over which inner voices preside."

-Stuart Dybek, author of Childhood and Other Neighborhoods and The Coast of Chicago

In Book of Exemplary Women, Diana Xin's debut short story collection, a ghost is passed across three generations of women as they navigate unspoken regrets and unfulfilled desires. Teen girls grapple with grief as they face the end of childhood and other losses. Young lovers confront the future while old lovers excavate the past. Mothers and daughters perceive each other in new ways as time reshapes their relationship. Across different stages of life, women strain against the expectations that rule their lives with quiet rebellion, bending and breaking to find new forms large enough to contain all that they carry. Together, their voices resist erasure, tracing how women hold themselves and each other intact. To create the cracks that expand possibility and challenge limitations, Xin presents both realist stories and their shadows--distortions upon the same themes with elements of magic, from light-touch hauntings to imagined literary trysts. Her characters defy the erasure common to stories about women. When they step off the page, they do so with defiance, laughing and raging as they slip beyond reach.