Watching Oksana and Other Stories

By Emily Meier

Watching Oksana features disparate voices, most of them speaking from the late twentieth century. The opening group of stories, “What You Do for Love,” is linked thematically, all of its protagonists in uniquely intense yet familiar parent–child relationships. “American Snapshot, 1993” is a stand-alone story in a more experimental vein that takes an oblique look at race. The “Laura” stories feature the same character at different points in her life, the last describing Laura’s dreamlike experience of the death of her mother. In the collection’s final story, “Swimming,” the main character’s desperate wish for a child leaves her emotionally numbed at the loss of her husband.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Emily Meier
• Release date: Feb 19, 2012
• ISBN: 9780983669289

Emily Meier

Emily Meier’s fiction has appeared widely, including in The Second Penguin Book of Modern Women’s Short Stories, the North American Review, Prairie Schooner and the Threepenny Review. She has won national fiction contests at the Florida Review and Passages North, been a Loft-McKnight Fiction award winner, and received fellowships from the Minnesota State Arts Board and the National Endowment for the Arts. She is the author of Suite Harmonic:A Civil War Novel of Rediscovery; Time Stamp: A Novel; In the Land of the Dinosaur: Ten Stories and a Novella; The Second Magician’s Tale; Watching Oksana and Other Stories; and Clare, Loving: A Novel in Three Novellas.

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