This Will Be Difficult to Explain and Other Stories

These loosely connected hypnotic stories about memory and desire showcase one of fiction's brightest new voices. Taking readers from South Dakota to Paris, to Japan, into art galleries, foreign apartments, farms and beach hotels, Johanna Skibsrud introduces an astonishing array of characters in these piercingly wise stories. A young maid at a hotel in France encounters a man who asks to paint her portrait, only later discovering that he is someone other than who we...
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These loosely connected hypnotic stories about memory and desire showcase one of fiction's brightest new voices.

Taking readers from South Dakota to Paris, to Japan, into art galleries, foreign apartments, farms and beach hotels, Johanna Skibsrud introduces an astonishing array of characters in these piercingly wise stories. A young maid at a hotel in France encounters a man who asks to paint her portrait, only later discovering that he is someone other than who we think he is. A divorced father who fears estrangement from his thirteen-year-old daughter allows her to take the wheel of his car, realising too late that he's made a grave mistake. Time and again Skibsrud's characters find themselves face to face with what they didn't know they didn't know, at the exact point of intersection between impossibility and desire.

In This Will Be Difficult to Explain, Skibsrud, whose prose has been compared to Nicole Krauss and Marilynne Robinson, has created a series of masterful, perceptive tales.