The Nest, the White Pagoda, the Suicide, a Forsaken Temple, Miss Jones and the Masterpiece

A haunted, gorgeous collection from a writer who understood that intimacy and isolation often wear the same face. The stories here orbit mortality, marriage, and the silences that calcify between people who once loved each other. The opening tale, "The Nest," follows a dying man returning home to his wife Kitty, both of them survivors of a relationship that once meant everything and now means something harder to name. Other stories venture further afield: a white pagoda in an exotic locale, a forsaken temple where something spiritual has gone wrong, an artist confronting her own masterpiece. Sedgwick writes with the kind of quiet devastation that builds not through dramatic gestures but through the accumulation of small recognitions. Her Americans in Europe, her artists and invalids, her women on the edge of understanding something about themselves they cannot quite say. This is fiction for readers who know that the most important stories are the ones we tell ourselves about why we're still here.