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ABOUT HELEN ON 86TH STREET

In Helen on 86th Street and Other Stories, girls grow into women and women become wise in portraits filled with biting humor and small but hard-earned victories. One girl makes a burnt offering of letters written to her wayward father, while another struggles to leave her dying father and face adult life. Women navigate the rocky shoals of adultery, illness, and infertility as they make their way in an unsteady world, where the heart is easily betrayed and loyalty is rarely a straightforward matter.

Wendi Kaufman writes intimately of daughters, mothers, and lovers, of first loves and difficult truths. This is the long-awaited celebration of a wry, unblinking, and ultimately triumphant literary voice.

PRAISE FOR HELEN ON 86TH STREET

“Crafted with a light hand and deftly imagined, these stories bloom like tiny effervescent explosions in the mind. Delectable, insightful, a pure joy to read.”
—Janet Fitch, New York Times best-selling author of Paint It Black and White Oleander

“These stories are by turns provocative, tender, sly, heartbreaking, and laugh-out-loud funny. Wendi Kaufman wields the twin knives of irony and insight with the expertise of a fencing master, and then salves the wounds with the deep compassion of a true healer.”
—Gary Krist, author of Empire of Sin and City of Scoundrels

“Wendi Kaufman’s stories explore the tricky, glorious connections between men and women, mothers and daughters, sisters, fathers and daughters. In them, people often leave each other. They break each other’s hearts. They realize how fleeting and fragile life is. And they triumph. Each story brings the reader a sense of hope in the end. A sense that, yeah, we can all keep going.”
—Ann Hood, author of The Obituary Writer and The Knitting Circle

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Wendi Kaufman's fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Fiction, and Other Voices, and her stories have been anthologized in Scribner’s Best of the Fiction Workshops, Elements of Literature, and Faultlines: Stories of Divorce. She received a literary fellowship from the Virginia Commission for the Arts, was the winner of a Mary Roberts Rhinehart award for short fiction, and a Breadloaf Scholar in Fiction. From 2005 – 2009, Kaufman curated “The Happy Booker,” a prominent Washington, D.C.-based book blog, and was a frequent contributor to The Washington Post and Washingtonian magazine. She graduated from George Mason University's MFA program in Creative Writing. Kaufman passed away in Aug. 2014 after a prolonged battle with cancer. Helen on 86th Street and Other Stories (Oct. 2014) was her first full-length collection.