Squandering the Blue

Squandering the Blue is Kate Braverman's first story collection, and it drops the reader into a Southern California of heat, glamour and ruin. The women who move through it are surrounded by artists, addicts, lovers and drifters, and their lives overlap across a set of linked stories. Affection and addiction are rarely separate here. Most of these people want something better and sense that it sits just beyond their reach.

The stories are brief and haunting, each one catching a woman at a point of breaking or change. "Falling in October" begins as a satire of the art world and turns into a feminist parable set after a nuclear catastrophe. In "Points of Decision," a woman tries to get out of an abusive relationship. In "Tall Tales from the Mekong Delta," which has appeared in many anthologies, a recovering alcoholic tries to hold together her sobriety and her role as a mother while a dangerously seductive stranger enters her life.

Braverman's prose is raw, lyrical and unsparing, and the collection keeps asking how people shape their own experiences, or bury them, while living in the long shadow of a life that never quite arrives. It is a hallucinatory, sensual and uncompromising book for readers who like short fiction with an edge.