The Ruin of Everything
LARA STAPLETON
Stories
“The real pleasure of this book lies in Stapleton’s irrepressible approach to narrative structure. Long, loose chains of events culminate in volta-like swerves…. these endings refashion early meanderings in thrilling flashes.”
—The New York Times
ISBN: 9781734496550
LCCN: 2021932139
Cover Art: Nanette Catigbe
Paper | 6x9 | 126 pages
Publication Date: October 19, 2021
List Price: $18 (price may vary by retailer)
Praise
“The real pleasure of this book lies in Stapleton’s irrepressible approach to narrative structure. Long, loose chains of events culminate in volta-like swerves…. these endings refashion early meanderings in thrilling flashes.”
—The New York Times
“Stapleton’s complex narrative structure will undoubtedly bedevil and enchant while wrestling with fundamental questions about identity.”
—Politico
“In Lara Stapleton’s The Ruin of Everything, stories dealt with issues of bifurcated identities and self-confidence or the lack thereof in the lives of Filipino Americans and how they negotiate their conflicting, slippery claims on the New York and/or Manila states of mind.”
—The News International
“An Anaïs Nin of late capitalism’s bohemia, Lara Stapleton writes like an oracle of an underworld—of miscegenated loves and translocated broken souls—of characters unaware or ruinously conscious—and she inscribes that world in us with lust and wit and always that deep joy that encompasses sorrows bred in the bone, the race, the colors of one’s skin, the heart, and of course the tongue: the word.”
—Gina Apostol, author of Insurrecto
“With a keen eye for human ambitions and human frailties, Stapleton brings us the comic turmoil of characters steeped in the sorrows and absurdities of modern life; reaching for connection and erring, reaching for home and missing. Brimming with hard-edged loneliness, these stories reach into the underbellies of our deepest hopes and fears.”
—Laurel Flores Fantauzzo, author of My Heart Underwater
“Stories of racial ambiguity, of being in-between, ‘both hypervisible and unseen,’ and love letters ‘to a modern generation of brown girls.’”
—Ligaya Mishan, NYT food and culture writer
“If you could read only one of the nine short stories, “New” makes the release of the entire book worthwhile. And “Flesh and Blood” also passed my key test as not just a reader but a writer: the story made me want to run to my own pen or keyboard to write. The stories are engaging but the writing is also a writer’s writer’s delight: the characterizations are not just deep but sumptuous, structures are not just innovative but fresh, and narratives are both finely detailed but interspersed with psychological caesuras for maximizing the reader’s inhabitance.”
—Eileen Tabios, author of DoveLion
“Stapleton often eschews the traditional arc of storytelling. Some read like expanded character sketches, though the story is IN the characters. This is not to say the narratives lack emotions — they are embedded in each character, affirmed or denied by their respective coteries. After all, aren’t we the sum of all lives we touched and denied?”
—Victor Velasco, poet & fiction writer
“Stapleton appears to have set out to navigate crisscrossing lives by simply allowing the characters, especially the I-persona, to adjudicate between everyday instances of hope and anguish… The navigation is skillfully conducted through shifting maps of loneliness, angst, and the occasional ruin of everything. The inherent intricacies develop a matrix of resultant debris that keeps the story-telling in the throes of deep engagement.”
—Alfred Yuson, literary critic and author of The Music Child
About the Author
Lara Stapleton is the author of the short story collection, The Lowest Blue Flame Before Nothing (Aunt Lute), an Independent Booksellers’ Selection and a Pen Open Book Committee Selection. She is the recipient of a Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation Grant for Writers, a two-time winner of the University of Michigan’s Hopwood Award for Fiction and winner of the Columbia Journal Fiction Prize.
(Author photo: Renee Rogoff)
