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We Ride Upon Sticks

A Novel

Part of Vintage Contemporaries

Author Quan Barry
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Paperback
$16.95 US
Knopf | Vintage
On sale Feb 16, 2021 | 384 Pages | 978-0-525-56543-7
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  • English > Literature > American Literature – 21st Century
  • About
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In the town of Danvers, Massachusetts, home of the original 1692 witch trials, the 1989 Danvers Falcons will do anything to make it to the state finals—even if it means tapping into some devilishly dark powers. Against a background of irresistible 1980s iconography, Quan Barry expertly weaves together the individual and collective progress of this enchanted team as they storm their way through an unforgettable season.
 
Helmed by good-girl captain Abby Putnam (a descendant of the infamous Salem accuser Ann Putnam) and her co-captain Jen Fiorenza (whose bleached blond “Claw” sees and knows all), the Falcons prove to be wily, original, and bold, flaunting society’s stale notions of femininity. Through the crucible of team sport and, more importantly, friendship, this comic tour de female force chronicles Barry’s glorious cast of characters as they charge past every obstacle on the path to finding their glorious true selves.

“Quirky, comic, and painstakingly detailed. . . . Barry writes with a sustained, manic energy.” 
—The New York Times Book Review

“A fresh coming-of-age story.” —Time

“Spellbinding, wickedly fun. . . . Each sentence fizzes like a just-opened bottle of New Coke.” 
—O, The Oprah Magazine

“A delightful, hilarious ode to the ‘80s.” —Ms. Magazine

“A perfect blend of aesthetic and narrative pleasure. . . . Very funny and a little angry and a lot of fun.” —Maris Kreizman
 
“Touching, hilarious, and deeply satisfying. . . . Readers will cheer [the team] on because what they’re really doing is learning to be fully and authentically themselves.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“A playful, nostalgic run through 1980s suburbia. . . . Barry handles a large cast of characters nimbly and affectionately, allowing each to take a turn or two in the spotlight.” —Publishers Weekly

“A charming novel that combines the beats of a sports movie with the dramas of teenagers coming of age. . . . There’s plenty of ’80s nostalgia . . . but Barry also delivers an earnest look at the divisions and secrets that can bubble up in a close group in any era.” —The AV Club

“Surprising and ultimately delightful. . . . The narration is playful, making the emotional crescendos even more satisfying. . . . Barry is a skilled storyteller and sentence artist who embraces irreverence where irreverence is due.” —Minneapolis Star-Tribune

“Charming. . . . But Barry is . . . careful not to let nostalgia paper over the real ways in which things were worse in the 1980s, particularly for queer people and people of color.” —NPR

“Riotously entertaining. . . . A witty, unruly ode to female empowerment and camaraderie.” —The Capital Times

“Quan Barry writes of [her characters] lovingly, tracing their coming-of-age with sardonic wit and generous indulgence.” —The Washington Times

“Funny and inventive.” —Bookreporter
 
“You may come for the sizzle of genre elements here, but you’ll stay for the rich bond forged by friendships on the field, the memories of misguided youth and the power of belief.” —Variety
 
“The prose style is neon and the laughs do not stop. I feel like the author wrote the entire book with an evil grin on her face.” —Molly Young, Vulture
Danvers vs. Masconomet
 
Two minutes into the second half, Masco’s #19 took an indirect shot on our goal. For a moment we lost sight of the ball in the scrum of players huddled in front of the net, the air blurry with sticks as if a hundred defenders were trying to clear it and a hundred others were trying to score. Considering how the first half went down, there really wasn’t any reason for those of us on offense to keep watch­ing, our defense porous as a broken window. True, our opponents, the Masconomet Chieftains, hadn’t officially put it in the net, but it was a foregone conclusion, the ball already as good as in, another Masco goal adorning the scoreboard. Girl Cory turned and started the humiliating trek back to midfield. A few of us began to follow.
 
“Come on, guys,” pleaded Abby Putnam as she watched our offense retake its positions on the center line, readying ourselves for yet another back pass that restarts play after a goal. “Masco hasn’t even scored yet.” No sooner were the words out of her mouth than the ball found daylight, shooting out of the throng and right through our own Mel Boucher’s heavily padded feet.
 
Abby hung her head, temporarily deflated. An empty potato-chip bag went sailing by, a tumbleweed in the wind. Quickly she pulled herself together and jogged back to midfield where the rest of our offense was already waiting, our forward line fanning ourselves with our sticks like a flock of overheated southern belles.
 
“Come here often?” offered Jen Fiorenza snidely from her posi­tion at left forward, but we were all too tired to tell her to cram it.
 
The Chieftains didn’t even cheer. It was 92° in the shade. If we could’ve rolled over and offered our throats, our pale underbellies flashing in the July sun, we would’ve, each of us a white flag. There were twenty-eight minutes of play left. It was hard to know who was having less fun—us or them. Mel Boucher stood in the goal, whacking the earth with her stick like a guitar god trashing his Stratocaster. Even at midfield you could hear what we knew by then was a string of invectives pouring out of her helmet. Tabarnaque! Je m’en câlisse! All first half Mel had been complaining about the sun being in her eyes, but we’d switched sides at halftime, so now it was God’s fault. “Baptême!” she shouted. From the looks of it there was a girl on the other team who was also French Canadian. You could tell by the smirk on her face. The referee just looked puzzled, unsure of whether or not she should throw a yellow card for sportsmanship, though honestly she wasn’t sure what she was hearing.
 
Why had we thought this year would be any different? Wasn’t that the very definition of insanity—standing around with our sticks in the air, not marking our man, playing everything but the angles, yet expecting things to be better, the ball effortlessly sailing into the opponent’s net? Usually when people talk about tradition, they mean the good things people pass down to whoever’s around to take up the mantle. Usually “tradition” doesn’t refer to stuff like whole seasons without a single win, or untold handfuls of broken fingers, split lips, or the time the bus got a flat on the way home from an away game double-digit drubbing and we sat by the side of Route 1 for the better part of an hour inhaling the world’s exhaust.
 
It was Monday afternoon, our first full day at Camp Wildcat on the University of New Hampshire campus, this atrocity our first scrimmage of the week. There would be other scrimmages every afternoon, other chances to have our asses served to us on a silver platter with a sprig of garni. Had we each really paid $375 to live in the dorms and spend our mornings doing burpees, our afternoons being publicly gutted? We were down 6-0 thirty-two minutes into play. By the time we finally scored at the fifty-five-minute mark, Masco was playing their third string.
 
Only Abby Putnam let out a halfhearted cheer as her shot hit the back of their net. You had to hand it to her—she had team spirit. Be. Aggressive. B-E aggressive. You couldn’t be a Putnam and live in Danvers and not be a believer, even when every other rational marker said don’t. Apparently the Putnams were just born like that. They had a way of latching on to a story and not letting go no mat­ter what, like a terrier with a rabbit. Abby was still in high spirits from last year’s season when we went 2-8, our best record in more than a decade. “We could go all the way to States this year,” she told Sue Yoon on the drive up to Camp Wildcat. Abby was sitting in the passenger seat, peeling her third banana of the day. About the only thing in life Abby Putnam feared was low potassium. “We’re seniors,” she added. “It’s our time.”
 
Sue Yoon flicked her Parliament out the window. Her hair was dyed Purplesaurus Rex, the artificial flavors in Kool-Aid coloring her locks a subtle shade of lilac. “Who do you think we are?” she said, the smoke vortexing out her nose. “The Bad News Bears?”
 
It was a good question. The Bad News Bears had come out in theaters more than a decade before, but it was the only sports movie we could name featuring a group of ragtag misfit kids. None of the other passengers in Sue’s pink Volkswagen Rabbit dubbed the Panic Mobile said anything. Maybe if one of us had given it a little more thought, things wouldn’t have gone down the way they did. Ancient urges which should’ve been snuffed out long ago wouldn’t have been unleashed. But sometimes objects in a mirror are closer than they appear. When you don’t speak up, you get what you get.
 
That afternoon at Camp Wildcat as Masconomet was annihilat­ing us brick by brick, we were eight months past having gone 2-8, and only Abby Putnam still openly admitted to wanting to be team captain come fall. At the end of halftime, just before retaking the field against Masco, we huddled up and hit the ground three times with our sticks. “Field field field,” Abby yelled.
 
Only a couple of us responded, the optimists and the overly polite, folks like Amy “Little Smitty” Smith and Julie Kaling and maybe AJ Johnson and Boy Cory. “Hockey hockey hockey,” they intoned more out of kindness rather than any innate hunger to win. The rest of us just kept our mouths shut.
 
Thirty minutes later we were out of our misery. The officials couldn’t even agree on the score. One claimed it was 8-1, the other 9-1. “Field field field,” screamed Abby, trying to gather us together for one final moment of bonding, but nobody answered, our minds already on showers and whether or not the soft-serve machine was fixed in the cafeteria.
 
“Nice game, ladies,” said Pam, the UNH senior assigned to be our coach. Real coaches weren’t allowed at camp, so players on the UNH collegiate team acted as such. Though we’d been thoroughly pounded by Masco, Pam had the same pleasantly surprised look on her face she always sported, like someone who’d scored a C+ on a test when at best they’d been hoping to land a D. Jen Fiorenza said Pam was stoned fifty minutes out of every hour. She said you could tell by the monstrous leg brace holding Pam’s knee together, her meniscus allegedly shredded like pulled pork, and by the way she washed back small pink pill after small pink pill with a Tab that’d been sitting out in the sun all day, how ten minutes later her face would melt into an expression of sheer boneless bliss.
 
“My aunt’s like that,” said Jen. “You could set her hair on fire and she wouldn’t even blink.” By “aunt,” we knew Jen was really talking about her mom.
 
Newly defeated, we spit out our mouth guards and ripped off our cleats, untaped our wrists. In twos and threes, we slugged back to the dorms through the late-afternoon air, the White Mountains’ humidity like dog stew. The cafeteria wouldn’t open up for another hour. When it did, Heather Houston would ladle out her third bowl of Cap’n Crunch for the day, at this point not even bothering to hide it under a plateful of salad. After dinner, the whole camp would probably watch some old tape of an Olympic game. If we were unlucky, the UNH head coach, Chrissy Hankl, might swing by and share with us a few inspirational clichés about unity, her baby-blue sun visor perfectly in place even though it would be well past nine, the sun long down behind South Mountain. Then bedtime, wash, rinse, and eight hours later repeat.
 
The morning sessions were mostly about conditioning. The camp planned it that way. First thing after breakfast before the heat got too bad we ran suicides. In the weight room we pushed through a series of wall sits, the room painted shiny with our back sweat. During the morning sessions they kept us together—freshmen, JV, and varsity, more than fifty teams from all over Massachusetts and New Hampshire running around with zinc on our noses. Afternoons we broke up into teams to scrimmage. Nights we watched tapes of games. Late night some of us snuck out to the fields to smoke. Late, late night some girls from Watertown tried to defect over to the dorms where the boys’ football camp was staying, but when they knocked on a random door, a girl answered brandishing a lacrosse stick.
 
The night we got demolished by Masco, Coach Hankl and her sun visor didn’t make an appearance at our video viewing. There were no old tapes of the bronze-medal match between Scotland and East Germany. Instead, we gathered in a run-down auditorium with the stuffing coming out of the seats and watched an instructional video about sportsmanship. It was the end of the ’80s, 1989 to be exact. Our parents hadn’t learned yet to scream at the referees, to shout things at the other team like, kill her, take her down. In the video, two teams form single-file lines on opposite sides of the field, then walk past one another, each girl saying something nice to the other girl as they high-five. Good game. Nice hustle. Good stickwork. One girl even says to her opponent, I like your eyeliner.
 
“What is she, a lesbo?” someone from the Greenfield team yelled. People sniggered. None of us knew any girls who were gay, or so we believed. When things went down later, Catholic martyr Julie Kaling said she thought only boys could be gay, and we razzed her for it, which was pretty mean, considering. Then the video started to get shaky, and pressing the tracking button didn’t help, and when one of the counselors finally hit eject, the tape got stuck in the VCR, and the team from Greenfield cheered.
 
And that’s what happened on Monday in the third week of July 1989, at the UNH Wildcat Field Hockey Camp. To recap: We got trounced by Masconomet. Heather Houston’s pupils were starting to look like magnified nuggets of Cap’n Crunch behind her 20/200 glasses. The soft-serve machine was still out of service. I like your eyeliner became the camp wisecrack. Mel Boucher got scored on a whole bunch and decided to look outside the box for some much-needed divine intervention.
 
And that made all the difference.
 
Psychologically, a goalie can only take so much, even a French Canadian one from a family of Catholic males. After she got scored on eight or nine times, Mel stormed back to her dorm room and took matters into her own hands. She got to work, ripping out the used pages in the notebook she’d gotten for her birthday, the one with the picture of Emilio Estevez printed on the cover, her parents secretly hoping Emilio’s boy-next-door appeal might guide their tomboy daughter gently into the right port, so to speak. Years later she would try to explain why she did it by saying that sometimes the Lord is busy and He needs us to be self-starters, show a little moxie.
 
But this is only the beginning of our tale. For now, let’s just say that Mel and her moxie made some new friends in low places. And thanks to the dark pledge Mel scribbled down in Emilio, for the rest of the week, the wins would come rolling in. Case in point: the very next day in our scrimmage against the Merrimack Valley confer­ence juggernaut Andover, we battled to a 1-1 draw. Sacré bleu! To go from 8 or 9 to 1 to a tie against a perennial powerhouse was unheard of. Suddenly heads everywhere began exploding. Girls on the other teams started to mimic us, desperate to go from zeros to heroes as fast as we did in the course of a single afternoon. The cafeteria couldn’t keep the Cap’n Crunch stocked fast enough.
 
Our secret? Over the course of the week, alone and in pairs, each of us made the grim pilgrimage to Mel’s second-floor dorm room and signed our names in her battered notebook, each time Emilio Estevez and his chipmunk cheeks staring straight into our souls. And with every new signature, Mel would cut another thin blue strip off one of her old stretched-out athletic socks and tie it around our arm just above the muscle where we could keep it hidden under our shirtsleeves, the sock a secret sign of our allegiance to what Heather Houston simply called “an alternative god,” the whole lot of us sud­denly running around like junkies with our arms tied off.
 
And that’s all it took for the proverbial worm to turn. We didn’t even have to believe in what Mel via Emilio was selling. Looking back at those early days, it was just kid stuff. All we had to do was keep our sticks on the ground and mark our man and yell hockey hockey hockey when the time was right and keep our mouths shut about the whole thing, all the while disregarding the insatiable hun­ger that was silently growing inside each and every one of us like a tumor. What could possibly go wrong? We were an eleven-man bevy of newly empowered teen girls. Abby Putnam was right. It was our time. Every three hundred years or so, our kind gets loosed upon an unsuspecting world. And this time around, the history books would know us as the 1989 Danvers High School Women’s Varsity Field Hockey Team. Be. Aggressive. B-E aggressive.
 
Tuesday after our 1-1 tie against mighty Andover, while still pad­ded up, Mel Boucher lowered herself down on one knee in the goal and bowed her head. This time only silence came pouring out of her helmet. The officials were still adding things up, but it looked like she had made an unbelievable fifty-two saves in net. Fifty-two saves coupled with Abby Putnam’s one goal and suddenly Camp Wildcat’s biggest losers were the talk of the town.
 
That night after dinner and more bowls of Cap’n Crunch, we schlepped to the auditorium for some videos about hand position and defending and attacking off corners. Toward the end of the evening Chrissy Hankl appeared with her trademark baby-blue sun visor. There was a rumor going around that her hair was attached to it. “Ladies,” she said.
 
“Apparently the chick doesn’t know us,” whispered AJ Johnson to Becca Bjelica.
 
“No duh,” replied Becca, as she pulled up her bra strap.
 
“I’m pleased to announce that a new camp record was set today,” said Coach Hankl. Then she called Mel up onstage and handed her a piece of paper with a pair of field hockey sticks crossed like a shield over some gibberish about excellence. Afterward, we noticed the certificate wasn’t printed on heavy card stock or anything, but we were still happy for her.
 
“I’ll have what she’s having,” joked Sue Yoon, quoting everyone’s favorite new movie line of the summer from When Harry Met Sally, which they weren’t carding for at the mall, although it was rated R.
 
Mel shot us a sly wink from the stage, which was surprising because the Mel Boucher we knew was more likely to accidentally wink with both eyes. In the low wattage of the auditorium, her all-American Québécois complexion looked radiant as any seraphim come to deliver the good news. And it was good news. For a team that most recently had posted a 2-8 record, it was wicked good news. Who knew? You scrawled your name in a book and tied yourself up like a pot roast with a piece of smelly blue tube sock and voilà! The world was your oyster. Mel was our very own archangel of darkness. In time, we were all having what she was having. Even Abby Putnam signed on after some initial sputtering. And what Mel Boucher was having was nothing the Judeo-Christian world we inhabited would have smiled on approvingly.
 
See, it turns out all those long dark hopeless seasons, we’d been putting our chips on the wrong god. Honestly, of all places on earth, the Town of Danvers should have seen us coming.
Copyright © 2020 by Quan Barry. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
  • WINNER | 2021
    ALA Alex Award
  • WINNER | 2021
    ALA Alex Award
  • WINNER | 2021
    ALA Alex Award
© Jim Barnard
Born in Saigon and raised in Massachusetts, QUAN BARRY is the author of the novels She Weeps Each Time You’re Born and We Ride Upon Sticks (winner of the 2020 ALA Alex Award), and four books of poetry, including Water Puppets (winner of the AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and a PEN Open Book finalist). Barry’s first play, The Mytilenean Debate, premiers in the spring of 2022. She is the Lorraine Hansberry Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. View titles by Quan Barry

About

In the town of Danvers, Massachusetts, home of the original 1692 witch trials, the 1989 Danvers Falcons will do anything to make it to the state finals—even if it means tapping into some devilishly dark powers. Against a background of irresistible 1980s iconography, Quan Barry expertly weaves together the individual and collective progress of this enchanted team as they storm their way through an unforgettable season.
 
Helmed by good-girl captain Abby Putnam (a descendant of the infamous Salem accuser Ann Putnam) and her co-captain Jen Fiorenza (whose bleached blond “Claw” sees and knows all), the Falcons prove to be wily, original, and bold, flaunting society’s stale notions of femininity. Through the crucible of team sport and, more importantly, friendship, this comic tour de female force chronicles Barry’s glorious cast of characters as they charge past every obstacle on the path to finding their glorious true selves.

“Quirky, comic, and painstakingly detailed. . . . Barry writes with a sustained, manic energy.” 
—The New York Times Book Review

“A fresh coming-of-age story.” —Time

“Spellbinding, wickedly fun. . . . Each sentence fizzes like a just-opened bottle of New Coke.” 
—O, The Oprah Magazine

“A delightful, hilarious ode to the ‘80s.” —Ms. Magazine

“A perfect blend of aesthetic and narrative pleasure. . . . Very funny and a little angry and a lot of fun.” —Maris Kreizman
 
“Touching, hilarious, and deeply satisfying. . . . Readers will cheer [the team] on because what they’re really doing is learning to be fully and authentically themselves.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“A playful, nostalgic run through 1980s suburbia. . . . Barry handles a large cast of characters nimbly and affectionately, allowing each to take a turn or two in the spotlight.” —Publishers Weekly

“A charming novel that combines the beats of a sports movie with the dramas of teenagers coming of age. . . . There’s plenty of ’80s nostalgia . . . but Barry also delivers an earnest look at the divisions and secrets that can bubble up in a close group in any era.” —The AV Club

“Surprising and ultimately delightful. . . . The narration is playful, making the emotional crescendos even more satisfying. . . . Barry is a skilled storyteller and sentence artist who embraces irreverence where irreverence is due.” —Minneapolis Star-Tribune

“Charming. . . . But Barry is . . . careful not to let nostalgia paper over the real ways in which things were worse in the 1980s, particularly for queer people and people of color.” —NPR

“Riotously entertaining. . . . A witty, unruly ode to female empowerment and camaraderie.” —The Capital Times

“Quan Barry writes of [her characters] lovingly, tracing their coming-of-age with sardonic wit and generous indulgence.” —The Washington Times

“Funny and inventive.” —Bookreporter
 
“You may come for the sizzle of genre elements here, but you’ll stay for the rich bond forged by friendships on the field, the memories of misguided youth and the power of belief.” —Variety
 
“The prose style is neon and the laughs do not stop. I feel like the author wrote the entire book with an evil grin on her face.” —Molly Young, Vulture

Excerpt

Danvers vs. Masconomet
 
Two minutes into the second half, Masco’s #19 took an indirect shot on our goal. For a moment we lost sight of the ball in the scrum of players huddled in front of the net, the air blurry with sticks as if a hundred defenders were trying to clear it and a hundred others were trying to score. Considering how the first half went down, there really wasn’t any reason for those of us on offense to keep watch­ing, our defense porous as a broken window. True, our opponents, the Masconomet Chieftains, hadn’t officially put it in the net, but it was a foregone conclusion, the ball already as good as in, another Masco goal adorning the scoreboard. Girl Cory turned and started the humiliating trek back to midfield. A few of us began to follow.
 
“Come on, guys,” pleaded Abby Putnam as she watched our offense retake its positions on the center line, readying ourselves for yet another back pass that restarts play after a goal. “Masco hasn’t even scored yet.” No sooner were the words out of her mouth than the ball found daylight, shooting out of the throng and right through our own Mel Boucher’s heavily padded feet.
 
Abby hung her head, temporarily deflated. An empty potato-chip bag went sailing by, a tumbleweed in the wind. Quickly she pulled herself together and jogged back to midfield where the rest of our offense was already waiting, our forward line fanning ourselves with our sticks like a flock of overheated southern belles.
 
“Come here often?” offered Jen Fiorenza snidely from her posi­tion at left forward, but we were all too tired to tell her to cram it.
 
The Chieftains didn’t even cheer. It was 92° in the shade. If we could’ve rolled over and offered our throats, our pale underbellies flashing in the July sun, we would’ve, each of us a white flag. There were twenty-eight minutes of play left. It was hard to know who was having less fun—us or them. Mel Boucher stood in the goal, whacking the earth with her stick like a guitar god trashing his Stratocaster. Even at midfield you could hear what we knew by then was a string of invectives pouring out of her helmet. Tabarnaque! Je m’en câlisse! All first half Mel had been complaining about the sun being in her eyes, but we’d switched sides at halftime, so now it was God’s fault. “Baptême!” she shouted. From the looks of it there was a girl on the other team who was also French Canadian. You could tell by the smirk on her face. The referee just looked puzzled, unsure of whether or not she should throw a yellow card for sportsmanship, though honestly she wasn’t sure what she was hearing.
 
Why had we thought this year would be any different? Wasn’t that the very definition of insanity—standing around with our sticks in the air, not marking our man, playing everything but the angles, yet expecting things to be better, the ball effortlessly sailing into the opponent’s net? Usually when people talk about tradition, they mean the good things people pass down to whoever’s around to take up the mantle. Usually “tradition” doesn’t refer to stuff like whole seasons without a single win, or untold handfuls of broken fingers, split lips, or the time the bus got a flat on the way home from an away game double-digit drubbing and we sat by the side of Route 1 for the better part of an hour inhaling the world’s exhaust.
 
It was Monday afternoon, our first full day at Camp Wildcat on the University of New Hampshire campus, this atrocity our first scrimmage of the week. There would be other scrimmages every afternoon, other chances to have our asses served to us on a silver platter with a sprig of garni. Had we each really paid $375 to live in the dorms and spend our mornings doing burpees, our afternoons being publicly gutted? We were down 6-0 thirty-two minutes into play. By the time we finally scored at the fifty-five-minute mark, Masco was playing their third string.
 
Only Abby Putnam let out a halfhearted cheer as her shot hit the back of their net. You had to hand it to her—she had team spirit. Be. Aggressive. B-E aggressive. You couldn’t be a Putnam and live in Danvers and not be a believer, even when every other rational marker said don’t. Apparently the Putnams were just born like that. They had a way of latching on to a story and not letting go no mat­ter what, like a terrier with a rabbit. Abby was still in high spirits from last year’s season when we went 2-8, our best record in more than a decade. “We could go all the way to States this year,” she told Sue Yoon on the drive up to Camp Wildcat. Abby was sitting in the passenger seat, peeling her third banana of the day. About the only thing in life Abby Putnam feared was low potassium. “We’re seniors,” she added. “It’s our time.”
 
Sue Yoon flicked her Parliament out the window. Her hair was dyed Purplesaurus Rex, the artificial flavors in Kool-Aid coloring her locks a subtle shade of lilac. “Who do you think we are?” she said, the smoke vortexing out her nose. “The Bad News Bears?”
 
It was a good question. The Bad News Bears had come out in theaters more than a decade before, but it was the only sports movie we could name featuring a group of ragtag misfit kids. None of the other passengers in Sue’s pink Volkswagen Rabbit dubbed the Panic Mobile said anything. Maybe if one of us had given it a little more thought, things wouldn’t have gone down the way they did. Ancient urges which should’ve been snuffed out long ago wouldn’t have been unleashed. But sometimes objects in a mirror are closer than they appear. When you don’t speak up, you get what you get.
 
That afternoon at Camp Wildcat as Masconomet was annihilat­ing us brick by brick, we were eight months past having gone 2-8, and only Abby Putnam still openly admitted to wanting to be team captain come fall. At the end of halftime, just before retaking the field against Masco, we huddled up and hit the ground three times with our sticks. “Field field field,” Abby yelled.
 
Only a couple of us responded, the optimists and the overly polite, folks like Amy “Little Smitty” Smith and Julie Kaling and maybe AJ Johnson and Boy Cory. “Hockey hockey hockey,” they intoned more out of kindness rather than any innate hunger to win. The rest of us just kept our mouths shut.
 
Thirty minutes later we were out of our misery. The officials couldn’t even agree on the score. One claimed it was 8-1, the other 9-1. “Field field field,” screamed Abby, trying to gather us together for one final moment of bonding, but nobody answered, our minds already on showers and whether or not the soft-serve machine was fixed in the cafeteria.
 
“Nice game, ladies,” said Pam, the UNH senior assigned to be our coach. Real coaches weren’t allowed at camp, so players on the UNH collegiate team acted as such. Though we’d been thoroughly pounded by Masco, Pam had the same pleasantly surprised look on her face she always sported, like someone who’d scored a C+ on a test when at best they’d been hoping to land a D. Jen Fiorenza said Pam was stoned fifty minutes out of every hour. She said you could tell by the monstrous leg brace holding Pam’s knee together, her meniscus allegedly shredded like pulled pork, and by the way she washed back small pink pill after small pink pill with a Tab that’d been sitting out in the sun all day, how ten minutes later her face would melt into an expression of sheer boneless bliss.
 
“My aunt’s like that,” said Jen. “You could set her hair on fire and she wouldn’t even blink.” By “aunt,” we knew Jen was really talking about her mom.
 
Newly defeated, we spit out our mouth guards and ripped off our cleats, untaped our wrists. In twos and threes, we slugged back to the dorms through the late-afternoon air, the White Mountains’ humidity like dog stew. The cafeteria wouldn’t open up for another hour. When it did, Heather Houston would ladle out her third bowl of Cap’n Crunch for the day, at this point not even bothering to hide it under a plateful of salad. After dinner, the whole camp would probably watch some old tape of an Olympic game. If we were unlucky, the UNH head coach, Chrissy Hankl, might swing by and share with us a few inspirational clichés about unity, her baby-blue sun visor perfectly in place even though it would be well past nine, the sun long down behind South Mountain. Then bedtime, wash, rinse, and eight hours later repeat.
 
The morning sessions were mostly about conditioning. The camp planned it that way. First thing after breakfast before the heat got too bad we ran suicides. In the weight room we pushed through a series of wall sits, the room painted shiny with our back sweat. During the morning sessions they kept us together—freshmen, JV, and varsity, more than fifty teams from all over Massachusetts and New Hampshire running around with zinc on our noses. Afternoons we broke up into teams to scrimmage. Nights we watched tapes of games. Late night some of us snuck out to the fields to smoke. Late, late night some girls from Watertown tried to defect over to the dorms where the boys’ football camp was staying, but when they knocked on a random door, a girl answered brandishing a lacrosse stick.
 
The night we got demolished by Masco, Coach Hankl and her sun visor didn’t make an appearance at our video viewing. There were no old tapes of the bronze-medal match between Scotland and East Germany. Instead, we gathered in a run-down auditorium with the stuffing coming out of the seats and watched an instructional video about sportsmanship. It was the end of the ’80s, 1989 to be exact. Our parents hadn’t learned yet to scream at the referees, to shout things at the other team like, kill her, take her down. In the video, two teams form single-file lines on opposite sides of the field, then walk past one another, each girl saying something nice to the other girl as they high-five. Good game. Nice hustle. Good stickwork. One girl even says to her opponent, I like your eyeliner.
 
“What is she, a lesbo?” someone from the Greenfield team yelled. People sniggered. None of us knew any girls who were gay, or so we believed. When things went down later, Catholic martyr Julie Kaling said she thought only boys could be gay, and we razzed her for it, which was pretty mean, considering. Then the video started to get shaky, and pressing the tracking button didn’t help, and when one of the counselors finally hit eject, the tape got stuck in the VCR, and the team from Greenfield cheered.
 
And that’s what happened on Monday in the third week of July 1989, at the UNH Wildcat Field Hockey Camp. To recap: We got trounced by Masconomet. Heather Houston’s pupils were starting to look like magnified nuggets of Cap’n Crunch behind her 20/200 glasses. The soft-serve machine was still out of service. I like your eyeliner became the camp wisecrack. Mel Boucher got scored on a whole bunch and decided to look outside the box for some much-needed divine intervention.
 
And that made all the difference.
 
Psychologically, a goalie can only take so much, even a French Canadian one from a family of Catholic males. After she got scored on eight or nine times, Mel stormed back to her dorm room and took matters into her own hands. She got to work, ripping out the used pages in the notebook she’d gotten for her birthday, the one with the picture of Emilio Estevez printed on the cover, her parents secretly hoping Emilio’s boy-next-door appeal might guide their tomboy daughter gently into the right port, so to speak. Years later she would try to explain why she did it by saying that sometimes the Lord is busy and He needs us to be self-starters, show a little moxie.
 
But this is only the beginning of our tale. For now, let’s just say that Mel and her moxie made some new friends in low places. And thanks to the dark pledge Mel scribbled down in Emilio, for the rest of the week, the wins would come rolling in. Case in point: the very next day in our scrimmage against the Merrimack Valley confer­ence juggernaut Andover, we battled to a 1-1 draw. Sacré bleu! To go from 8 or 9 to 1 to a tie against a perennial powerhouse was unheard of. Suddenly heads everywhere began exploding. Girls on the other teams started to mimic us, desperate to go from zeros to heroes as fast as we did in the course of a single afternoon. The cafeteria couldn’t keep the Cap’n Crunch stocked fast enough.
 
Our secret? Over the course of the week, alone and in pairs, each of us made the grim pilgrimage to Mel’s second-floor dorm room and signed our names in her battered notebook, each time Emilio Estevez and his chipmunk cheeks staring straight into our souls. And with every new signature, Mel would cut another thin blue strip off one of her old stretched-out athletic socks and tie it around our arm just above the muscle where we could keep it hidden under our shirtsleeves, the sock a secret sign of our allegiance to what Heather Houston simply called “an alternative god,” the whole lot of us sud­denly running around like junkies with our arms tied off.
 
And that’s all it took for the proverbial worm to turn. We didn’t even have to believe in what Mel via Emilio was selling. Looking back at those early days, it was just kid stuff. All we had to do was keep our sticks on the ground and mark our man and yell hockey hockey hockey when the time was right and keep our mouths shut about the whole thing, all the while disregarding the insatiable hun­ger that was silently growing inside each and every one of us like a tumor. What could possibly go wrong? We were an eleven-man bevy of newly empowered teen girls. Abby Putnam was right. It was our time. Every three hundred years or so, our kind gets loosed upon an unsuspecting world. And this time around, the history books would know us as the 1989 Danvers High School Women’s Varsity Field Hockey Team. Be. Aggressive. B-E aggressive.
 
Tuesday after our 1-1 tie against mighty Andover, while still pad­ded up, Mel Boucher lowered herself down on one knee in the goal and bowed her head. This time only silence came pouring out of her helmet. The officials were still adding things up, but it looked like she had made an unbelievable fifty-two saves in net. Fifty-two saves coupled with Abby Putnam’s one goal and suddenly Camp Wildcat’s biggest losers were the talk of the town.
 
That night after dinner and more bowls of Cap’n Crunch, we schlepped to the auditorium for some videos about hand position and defending and attacking off corners. Toward the end of the evening Chrissy Hankl appeared with her trademark baby-blue sun visor. There was a rumor going around that her hair was attached to it. “Ladies,” she said.
 
“Apparently the chick doesn’t know us,” whispered AJ Johnson to Becca Bjelica.
 
“No duh,” replied Becca, as she pulled up her bra strap.
 
“I’m pleased to announce that a new camp record was set today,” said Coach Hankl. Then she called Mel up onstage and handed her a piece of paper with a pair of field hockey sticks crossed like a shield over some gibberish about excellence. Afterward, we noticed the certificate wasn’t printed on heavy card stock or anything, but we were still happy for her.
 
“I’ll have what she’s having,” joked Sue Yoon, quoting everyone’s favorite new movie line of the summer from When Harry Met Sally, which they weren’t carding for at the mall, although it was rated R.
 
Mel shot us a sly wink from the stage, which was surprising because the Mel Boucher we knew was more likely to accidentally wink with both eyes. In the low wattage of the auditorium, her all-American Québécois complexion looked radiant as any seraphim come to deliver the good news. And it was good news. For a team that most recently had posted a 2-8 record, it was wicked good news. Who knew? You scrawled your name in a book and tied yourself up like a pot roast with a piece of smelly blue tube sock and voilà! The world was your oyster. Mel was our very own archangel of darkness. In time, we were all having what she was having. Even Abby Putnam signed on after some initial sputtering. And what Mel Boucher was having was nothing the Judeo-Christian world we inhabited would have smiled on approvingly.
 
See, it turns out all those long dark hopeless seasons, we’d been putting our chips on the wrong god. Honestly, of all places on earth, the Town of Danvers should have seen us coming.
Copyright © 2020 by Quan Barry. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Awards

  • WINNER | 2021
    ALA Alex Award
  • WINNER | 2021
    ALA Alex Award
  • WINNER | 2021
    ALA Alex Award

Author

© Jim Barnard
Born in Saigon and raised in Massachusetts, QUAN BARRY is the author of the novels She Weeps Each Time You’re Born and We Ride Upon Sticks (winner of the 2020 ALA Alex Award), and four books of poetry, including Water Puppets (winner of the AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and a PEN Open Book finalist). Barry’s first play, The Mytilenean Debate, premiers in the spring of 2022. She is the Lorraine Hansberry Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. View titles by Quan Barry

Additional formats

  • We Ride Upon Sticks
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    A Novel
    Jill Ciment
    978-0-8041-6970-7
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Mar 22, 2016
  • Crow Fair
    Crow Fair
    Stories
    Thomas McGuane
    978-0-345-80591-1
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Mar 08, 2016
  • Voices in the Night
    Voices in the Night
    Steven Millhauser
    978-0-8041-6908-0
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Mar 08, 2016
  • She Weeps Each Time You're Born
    She Weeps Each Time You're Born
    Quan Barry
    978-0-8041-7130-4
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Feb 23, 2016
  • There's Something I Want You to Do
    There's Something I Want You to Do
    Stories
    Charles Baxter
    978-0-8041-7273-8
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Feb 23, 2016
  • Lucky Alan
    Lucky Alan
    and Other Stories
    Jonathan Lethem
    978-1-101-87366-3
    $15.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Feb 23, 2016
  • The Tusk That Did the Damage
    The Tusk That Did the Damage
    A Novel
    Tania James
    978-0-8041-7343-8
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Feb 09, 2016
  • Single, Carefree, Mellow
    Single, Carefree, Mellow
    Katherine Heiny
    978-0-8041-7315-5
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 26, 2016
  • The Extraordinary Journey of the Fakir Who Got Trapped in an Ikea Wardrobe
    The Extraordinary Journey of the Fakir Who Got Trapped in an Ikea Wardrobe
    Romain Puertolas
    978-0-8041-7208-0
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 12, 2016
  • Beginners
    Beginners
    The Original Version of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
    Raymond Carver
    978-0-307-94792-5
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Sep 15, 2015
  • Marrying the Ketchups
    Marrying the Ketchups
    A novel
    Jennifer Close
    978-0-593-08138-9
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Apr 25, 2023
  • You Have a Friend in 10A
    You Have a Friend in 10A
    Stories
    Maggie Shipstead
    978-1-9848-9771-8
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Apr 18, 2023
  • Harrow
    Harrow
    A novel
    Joy Williams
    978-1-9848-9880-7
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jul 05, 2022
  • Phase Six
    Phase Six
    A novel
    Jim Shepard
    978-0-525-56503-1
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    May 24, 2022
  • Whereabouts
    Whereabouts
    Jhumpa Lahiri
    978-0-593-31208-7
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Mar 29, 2022
  • A Bright Ray of Darkness
    A Bright Ray of Darkness
    A novel
    Ethan Hawke
    978-0-8041-7052-9
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 18, 2022
  • The Sun Collective
    The Sun Collective
    A Novel
    Charles Baxter
    978-1-9848-9971-2
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Oct 05, 2021
  • Red Pill
    Red Pill
    A novel
    Hari Kunzru
    978-1-101-97322-6
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Aug 31, 2021
  • Leave Society
    Leave Society
    Tao Lin
    978-1-101-97447-6
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Aug 03, 2021
  • I Give It to You
    I Give It to You
    A Novel
    Valerie Martin
    978-0-593-08211-9
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jul 27, 2021
  • Push (Revised)
    Push (Revised)
    Sapphire
    978-0-593-31460-9
    $15.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jun 22, 2021
  • Push
    Push
    Sapphire
    978-0-593-46675-9
    $11.99 US
    Ebook
    Vintage
    Jun 22, 2021
  • Why I Don't Write
    Why I Don't Write
    And Other Stories
    Susan Minot
    978-1-9848-9987-3
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jun 15, 2021
  • Animal Spirit
    Animal Spirit
    Stories
    Francesca Marciano
    978-0-525-56574-1
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    May 18, 2021
  • Friends and Strangers
    Friends and Strangers
    A novel
    J. Courtney Sullivan
    978-0-525-43647-8
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Apr 27, 2021
  • The Knockout Queen
    The Knockout Queen
    A novel
    Rufi Thorpe
    978-0-525-56729-5
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Mar 02, 2021
  • Weather
    Weather
    Jenny Offill
    978-0-345-80690-1
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 19, 2021
  • The Resisters
    The Resisters
    A novel
    Gish Jen
    978-0-525-65722-4
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 12, 2021
  • The Red Lotus
    The Red Lotus
    A Novel
    Chris Bohjalian
    978-0-525-56596-3
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 05, 2021
  • The Queen's Gambit (Television Tie-in)
    The Queen's Gambit (Television Tie-in)
    Walter Tevis
    978-0-593-31465-4
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Dec 15, 2020
  • Interior Chinatown
    Interior Chinatown
    A Novel
    Charles Yu
    978-0-307-94847-2
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Nov 17, 2020
  • Sleep Donation
    Sleep Donation
    Karen Russell
    978-0-525-56608-3
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Sep 29, 2020
  • Middle England
    Middle England
    A novel
    Jonathan Coe
    978-0-525-56684-7
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jul 14, 2020
  • Everything Inside
    Everything Inside
    Stories
    Edwidge Danticat
    978-0-525-56305-1
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jul 07, 2020
  • The Flight Portfolio
    The Flight Portfolio
    A novel
    Julie Orringer
    978-0-307-94971-4
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jun 30, 2020
  • Water Witches
    Water Witches
    Chris Bohjalian
    978-0-593-08178-5
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jun 30, 2020
  • Very Nice
    Very Nice
    A novel
    Marcy Dermansky
    978-0-525-56522-2
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jun 09, 2020
  • Dual Citizens
    Dual Citizens
    A novel
    Alix Ohlin
    978-0-525-56355-6
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    May 19, 2020
  • The Body in Question
    The Body in Question
    A Novel
    Jill Ciment
    978-0-525-56537-6
    $15.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    May 19, 2020
  • Orange World and Other Stories
    Orange World and Other Stories
    Karen Russell
    978-0-525-56607-6
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    May 05, 2020
  • Lost and Wanted
    Lost and Wanted
    A novel
    Nell Freudenberger
    978-0-8041-7096-3
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Mar 31, 2020
  • The River
    The River
    A novel
    Peter Heller
    978-0-525-56353-2
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Mar 03, 2020
  • Goulash
    Goulash
    A Novel
    Brian Kimberling
    978-0-345-80337-5
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 21, 2020
  • The Stories of Alice Adams
    The Stories of Alice Adams
    Alice Adams
    978-1-9848-9811-1
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Nov 19, 2019
  • Old Newgate Road
    Old Newgate Road
    A novel
    Keith Scribner
    978-0-525-56346-4
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Oct 08, 2019
  • Notes from the Fog
    Notes from the Fog
    Ben Marcus
    978-1-101-97168-0
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jul 09, 2019
  • Red, White, Blue
    Red, White, Blue
    A novel
    Lea Carpenter
    978-0-525-43298-2
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jun 04, 2019
  • Good Trouble
    Good Trouble
    Stories
    Joseph O'Neill
    978-0-525-43664-5
    $15.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    May 14, 2019
  • Sociable
    Sociable
    Rebecca Harrington
    978-0-8041-7217-2
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Feb 05, 2019
  • The Flight Attendant
    The Flight Attendant
    A Novel
    Chris Bohjalian
    978-0-525-43268-5
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 08, 2019
  • Cockfosters
    Cockfosters
    Stories
    Helen Simpson
    978-0-525-56362-4
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Sep 04, 2018
  • Gork, the Teenage Dragon
    Gork, the Teenage Dragon
    A Novel
    Gabe Hudson
    978-0-375-71341-5
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jun 26, 2018
  • The Misfortune of Marion Palm
    The Misfortune of Marion Palm
    A Novel
    Emily Culliton
    978-0-525-43262-3
    $15.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jun 26, 2018
  • Saints for All Occasions
    Saints for All Occasions
    A novel
    J. Courtney Sullivan
    978-0-307-94980-6
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    May 29, 2018
  • Chemistry
    Chemistry
    A Novel
    Weike Wang
    978-0-525-43222-7
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Apr 03, 2018
  • Trajectory
    Trajectory
    Stories
    Richard Russo
    978-1-101-97198-7
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Apr 03, 2018
  • Living in the Weather of the World
    Living in the Weather of the World
    Stories
    Richard Bausch
    978-0-525-43185-5
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Mar 20, 2018
  • The Delight of Being Ordinary
    The Delight of Being Ordinary
    A Road Trip with the Pope and the Dalai Lama
    Roland Merullo
    978-1-101-97079-9
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Mar 06, 2018
  • White Tears
    White Tears
    A novel
    Hari Kunzru
    978-1-101-97321-9
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Feb 06, 2018
  • The Girl at the Baggage Claim
    The Girl at the Baggage Claim
    Explaining the East-West Culture Gap
    Gish Jen
    978-1-101-97206-9
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 16, 2018
  • Celine
    Celine
    A novel
    Peter Heller
    978-1-101-97348-6
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 02, 2018
  • Signals
    Signals
    New and Selected Stories
    Tim Gautreaux
    978-1-101-97251-9
    $17.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Dec 12, 2017
  • The Sleepwalker
    The Sleepwalker
    A Novel
    Chris Bohjalian
    978-0-8041-7099-4
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Oct 03, 2017
  • A Gambler's Anatomy
    A Gambler's Anatomy
    A Novel
    Jonathan Lethem
    978-1-101-87367-0
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Sep 05, 2017
  • The Tragedy of Brady Sims
    The Tragedy of Brady Sims
    Ernest J. Gaines
    978-0-525-43446-7
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Aug 29, 2017
  • Bridget Jones's Baby
    Bridget Jones's Baby
    The Diaries
    Helen Fielding
    978-0-525-43388-0
    $15.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jul 25, 2017
  • Attic
    Attic
    Katherine Dunn
    978-0-525-43406-1
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jul 11, 2017
  • How to Set a Fire and Why
    How to Set a Fire and Why
    A Novel
    Jesse Ball
    978-1-101-91175-4
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jun 13, 2017
  • Break in Case of Emergency
    Break in Case of Emergency
    A Novel
    Jessica Winter
    978-1-101-91193-8
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jun 13, 2017
  • The Hopefuls
    The Hopefuls
    Jennifer Close
    978-1-101-91145-7
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    May 30, 2017
  • Bright, Precious Days
    Bright, Precious Days
    A Novel
    Jay McInerney
    978-1-101-97226-7
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    May 30, 2017
  • This Must Be the Place
    This Must Be the Place
    Maggie O'Farrell
    978-0-345-80472-3
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    May 16, 2017
  • The Pier Falls
    The Pier Falls
    And Other Stories
    Mark Haddon
    978-1-101-97013-3
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    May 02, 2017
  • Dear Fang, With Love
    Dear Fang, With Love
    A Novel
    Rufi Thorpe
    978-1-101-91157-0
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Apr 18, 2017
  • Sweetbitter
    Sweetbitter
    Stephanie Danler
    978-1-101-91186-0
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Apr 04, 2017
  • Honeymoon and Other Stories
    Honeymoon and Other Stories
    Kevin Canty
    978-0-525-43504-4
    $13.99 US
    Ebook
    Vintage
    Feb 22, 2017
  • Before the Wind
    Before the Wind
    A Novel
    Jim Lynch
    978-0-307-94935-6
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Feb 21, 2017
  • Burning Down the House
    Burning Down the House
    A Novel
    Jane Mendelsohn
    978-1-101-91119-8
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Feb 21, 2017
  • The Bed Moved
    The Bed Moved
    Stories
    Rebecca Schiff
    978-1-101-91085-6
    $15.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Feb 07, 2017
  • The Guest Room
    The Guest Room
    Chris Bohjalian
    978-0-8041-7098-7
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Oct 25, 2016
  • The Mare
    The Mare
    A Novel
    Mary Gaitskill
    978-0-307-74360-2
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Oct 04, 2016
  • Sea Lovers
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    Selected Stories
    Valerie Martin
    978-0-307-73955-1
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
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    978-0-525-43304-0
    $13.99 US
    Ebook
    Vintage
    Aug 17, 2016
  • The Visiting Privilege
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    New and Collected Stories
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    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Aug 09, 2016
  • The Captive Condition
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    A Novel
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    978-0-8041-6930-1
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jul 12, 2016
  • Days of Awe
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    978-0-307-38827-8
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
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    Jun 28, 2016
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    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jun 28, 2016
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    978-0-8041-7290-5
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jun 14, 2016
  • A Cure for Suicide
    A Cure for Suicide
    A Novel
    Jesse Ball
    978-1-101-87213-0
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jun 14, 2016
  • A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me
    A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me
    Stories and a Novella
    David Gates
    978-0-8041-6874-8
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Apr 19, 2016
  • Act of God
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    A Novel
    Jill Ciment
    978-0-8041-6970-7
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
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    Mar 22, 2016
  • Crow Fair
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    Stories
    Thomas McGuane
    978-0-345-80591-1
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
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  • Voices in the Night
    Voices in the Night
    Steven Millhauser
    978-0-8041-6908-0
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
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    Mar 08, 2016
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    Quan Barry
    978-0-8041-7130-4
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
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    Feb 23, 2016
  • There's Something I Want You to Do
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    $16.00 US
    Paperback
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    Feb 23, 2016
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    and Other Stories
    Jonathan Lethem
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    $15.00 US
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    978-0-8041-7343-8
    $16.95 US
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    $16.00 US
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  • The Extraordinary Journey of the Fakir Who Got Trapped in an Ikea Wardrobe
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  • Beginners
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    Sep 15, 2015

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