How Strange a Season: Fiction

Author: Megan Mayhew Bergman

"Dazzling." --The New York Times Book Review, Editors' Choice
"Richly satisfying." --The Wall Street Journal
"These are stories you want to live in...a collection perfectly suited for our moment." --Booklist (starred review)

A collection of stories "so beautifully crafted they feel like tiny worlds unto themselves" (Los Angeles Times) about women experiencing all life's beauty and challenges, from award-winning writer Megan Mayhew Bergman.

A recently separated woman fills a huge terrarium with rare flowers to establish control over a small world and attempt to heal her broken heart. A competitive swimmer negotiates over which days she will fulfill her wifely duties, and which days she will keep for herself. A peach farmer wonders if her orchard will survive a drought. And generations of a family in South Carolina struggle with fidelity and their cruel past, some clinging to old ways and others painfully carving new paths.

In this "closely observed" (The New Yorker) collection, Megan Mayhew Bergman portrays women who wrestle with problematic inheritances: a modern glass house on a treacherous California cliff, a water-starved ranch, and an abandoned plantation on a river near Charleston. "Bergman's stories are so emotionally rich that they serve as portals into distinct interior worlds...this collection is distinct and vivid...As singular as it is atmospheric" (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).

Publisher: Scribner Book Company
Published: 03/29/2022
Pages: 304
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.85lbs
Size: 8.50h x 5.90w x 1.20d
ISBN: 9781476713106

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 11/29/2021
Booklist 02/01/2022 pg. 18
Kirkus Reviews 02/15/2022

About the Author
Mayhew Bergman, Megan: - Megan Mayhew Bergman is the author of Almost Famous Women and Birds of a Lesser Paradise. Her short fiction has appeared in two volumes of The Best American Short Stories and on NPR's Selected Shorts. She has written columns on climate change and the natural world for The Guardian and The Paris Review. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Tin House, Ploughshares, Oxford American, Orion, and elsewhere. She teaches literature and environmental writing at Middlebury College, where she also serves as director of the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers' Conference. She lives on a small farm in Vermont.