Goodnight, Beautiful Women
Editorial Reviews
Review
Praise for GOODNIGHT, BEAUTIFUL WOMEN:
AmazonBooks "Noyes writes convincingly about the landscape . . . and the working class . . . Though the stories, told from various points of view, contain threats of violence from rapists and molesters, the greatest menace comes from the harm the young female protagonists seem capable of bringing on themselves . . . [Noyes is] a writer who values nuance over tidy endings. These flawed female characters struggle to survive against threats both external and internal in this well-written debut." —Kirkus Reviews "Silky, lucid . . . fluid, raw, and strikingly original." —Publishers Weekly "With terrible grace, these stories bring to light the peril hidden within the mundane, and cast their enthralling shadow on characters that ache like you yourself have ached at your most private moments. Anna Noyes is a revelation." —Alexandra Kleeman "Noyes' achievement here is nothing less than a high-wire act: precise, fearless, breathtaking. She casts an unwavering gaze on the nature of frailty and desire, offering up gem after gem in this sensuous and startling debut." —Téa Obreht "Seductive, smart, and erotic, Anna Noyes' stories evoke with beautiful clarity love and sexual awakening. She is a most exciting discovery." —Lily King “Assured and atmospheric, tender and melancholy, these stories of women adrift linger in the mind like music. I love them.” —Karen Thompson Walker “The thing us, some literature has personality. It shows a human being wrote it, not a machine. It is the one voice, the one soul, the real live touch of a singular hand. That is mastery and it is Anna Noyes.” —Carolyn Chute "This is an extraordinary book of stories. Many of the characters are anchored to coastal Maine, but a particular quality of wildness animates nearly all of them. The stories are energetic, often mysterious, and beautifully written, and they will stay in your memory long after you finish the book." —Charles Baxter “Anna Noyes has the gift. Her sentences sing with a gentle perfection, almost as if to themselves, and her characters seem to enter the page cradling years of experience inside them. It is a joy—and the sweetest kind of heartache—to watch her making her swift way story by story to their hearts.” —Kevin Brockmeier "I read Goodnight, Beautiful Women in one ravenous sitting. Every one of these stories has a moment of subtle, delicious heartbreak (sometimes driving the story, sometimes in the periphery). With exceptional delicacy and grace, Noyes cracks opens the most ordinary moments and offers us their painful core. Often I found myself baffled that such simple details (a child's fingers beneath a door, the ache of a missing tooth during first sex, the smell of a banished stepfather's jacket) can contain so much. And yet she doesn't posture or try too hard. She simply has an instinct for what might be remembered later, when the importance of an event finally reveals itself. Noyes's prose is precise, skillful, and full of raw emotion. It's some of the most elegant writing I've come across recently." —Dina Nayeri “A mesmerizing collection of stories by one of America's most exciting young writers, Goodnight, Beautiful Women moves us along and around the coast of Maine and into the intimate lives of its inhabitants. These pages are full of moments that are wrenching, funny, and lit by a deeply sensuous attention to the small betrayals and sacrifices our dreams leave in their wake. Tender yet unsentimental, unflinchingly bold but full of beauty, Anna Noyes’ debut collection lingers in the mind well beyond its final paragraph. A book to fall in love with.” —Jonathan Lee “In stories both hypnotic and precise, Goodnight, Beautiful Women immerses us in a Maine unseen by ‘summer people’—an uneasily beautiful place of cloistered towns where ‘you can’t keep anything to yourself.’ These stories shine with prismatic, perfectly rendered settings, but more brilliant still is the delicacy with which Noyes unspools the inner lives of her characters. Here are young women haunted by long-ago lies and shameful betrayals, whose pasts are kept achingly close to the surface by hometowns that will neither forget nor forgive. This feels like no debut at all, but a voice fully formed.” —Casey Walker
About the Author
Anna Noyes is a recent graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her fiction has appeared in VICE, A Public Space, and Guernica, amongst others. She has received the Aspen Words Emerging Writer Fellowship and the James Merrill House Fellowship, and has served as writer-in-residence at the Polli Talu Arts Center in Estonia. Goodnight, Beautiful Women, received the 2013 Henfield Prize for Fiction.
