A Wild, Cold State

In the collection of short stories A Wild, Cold State, Flannery O'Connor Award-winning author Debra Monroe takes us into the lives of women striving for love and emotional fulfillment amidst a forbidding topography of glacial winds and stormy, unpredictable men. Set in rural Wisconsin, these interwoven tales run a gamut of moods and textures, ranging from the warmly nostalgic "The World's Great Love Novels," in which the young narrator observes the extreme compromises adults make in the name of love, to the hard-edged and gritty "Crossroads Cafe," in which a waitress searches for tenderness, though nothing in her life so far suggests that tenderness is available. Rendered in a spare and poetic style and marked by a nuanced grasp of relationships and the vagaries of desire, the stories in A Wild, Cold State offer a familiar and resonant portrayal of the complexities of everyday life and the fundamental human need for connection.