Objects of Desire

Bold and beguiling

Chloe Aridjis, author of Book of Clouds

The summer's most buzzed about book is the debut short story collection by Clare Sestanovich . . . Each is a small insight into the lives of women, some on the brink of adulthood, others navigating later years

Sunday Times

As far as writing pedigrees go, it doesn’t get much more impressive than The New Yorker and The Paris Review – so it’s no surprise that journalist Clare Sestanovich's first anthology contains eleven tightly-edited, perfectly-observed vignettes, all with women of various ages at their core . . . The tone throughout is cool and detached, which makes Sestanovich’s characters – some named, some anonymous – even more potent as they face a cacophony of modern relationship issues . . . A smart, incisive look at the complexities of being a woman right now

Stylist

Smart and accomplished . . . Sestanovich’s prose is poised and understated, sensorily precise . . . [Her characters] are wryly astute in their assessments of others; it is a pleasure to see the world through their sharp eyes. Sestanovich’s gift is to make ordinary moments shine brightly

The New York Times Book Review

Astonishing - one of the best story collections I’ve read in a long time . . . I feel like I've found a new favorite writer - Clare Sestanovich is stylish and skilled, an astute chronicler of contemporary life

Brandon Taylor, Booker-shortlisted author of Real Life

Nuanced, beautifully shaped . . . In Sestanovich’s hands, the mundane feels surprising—mesmerizing, even

Refinery29

Clare Sestanovich’s stories compelled me like gravity, and offered sharp, surprising, singular bursts of grace

Leslie Jamison, author of The Recovering and The Empathy Exams

Sparingly told, evoked with lacerating intimacy, these stories explode across the fault lines of the small decisions that make a life . . . Extraordinary

Esquire

Clare Sestanovich is a gifted observer and writes a sentence sharp enough to cut yourself on . . . A magnificent debut

Nathan Englander, author of Dinner at the Center of the Earth

A debut story collection of the rarest kind: One in which you wish that every single entry could be an entire novel. Sestanovich, who works for The New Yorker, takes seemingly everyday situations (a young woman flying home, a couple cohabitating in a small apartment) and goes in deep to reveal the sort of universal truths about society that we're always hungering for

Entertainment Weekly

Objects of Desire is a marvel . . . I loved this book

Miranda Popkey, author of Topics of Conversation

Luminous . . . Sestanovich writes with a kind of bracing cold-plunge clarity. Objects of Desire taps into the peculiar, primal struggle of becoming who you are, and all the stories you have to tell yourself to get there. Grade: A

Entertainment Weekly

A fun read [that] reminds us that we’re all human

Kaia Gerber, quoted in The Wall Street Journal

Objects of Desire reminds me of the soulful stories that emerged in mid-century America, the heyday for the form. Each one is bursting with small, explosive moments, like fireworks illuminating the bareness of the protagonists’ lives . . . Sestanovich is a skilled craftswoman, each sentence a carefully positioned tile in a mosaic

Vulture

These stories are wickedly perceptive - Sestanovich precisely measures the distance between how people think of themselves and how the world reads them. A mesmerizing, exquisite debut

Dana Spiotta, author of Innocents and Others

These stories know how we shape ourselves through brief encounters, befuddled recoiling, and endless lonely mulling. Her characters always seem poised at the brink of some great, terrifying, wondrous unraveling

Electric Literature

Sestanovich’s intelligent debut collection demonstrates a gift for pithy detail that encapsulates the whole of a character’s personality or era of lived experience . . . The collection finds cohesion around the quiet angst of mostly young, female narrators who long for experiences, other people, and states of being just beyond their grasp

Publishers Weekly

With Sestanovich, the everyday is a little shinier. Objects of Desire is filled with [the] kind of details that make up the world . . . both the vivid and the mundane. Her humor is subtle and earnest. The book's tiny moments are what create layers atop the unexceptional

NPR

Exquisitely observed, and sure to stay with you long after you’ve finished

Bustle

Wry and knowing and deeply funny

Mira Sethi, author of Are You Enjoying?

Sestanovich’s writing is clever and rich with layers, just like her characters. And the textures of her sentences are as nuanced as desire itself

Fiction Writers' Review

These stories are restrained, nearly aloof, despite the fact that the characters are constantly and messily butting up against the futility of their desires

Kirkus

These eleven short stories about lust, womanhood and self-identity portray the author’s meticulous skill for observation as she draws out the amusing and the melancholic from seemingly everyday interactions. . . Sestanovich expertly places you in the mind of different women, young and old, rich and poor, single and in relationships. The stolen glimpses into the complex minds of her characters will leave you unable to resist writing the rest of their story in your head

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