Maura Stanton – författare

In accessible poems full of rich detail and painterly images, Maura Stanton looks under the surface of the ordinary, hoping to find the magic spark below the visible. In poems both humorous and elegaic, she gathers strange facts, odd events, and overlooked stories to construct her own vision of immortality, one made up of fragments of history and geography and the illusions of yearning human beings. From elephants in Ceylon to Nazi prisoners in Ireland, from Beowulf to Jane Austen, from sonnets to prose poems to blank verse, Immortal Sofa conjures our complex existence in all its sorrowful but astonishing variety.

Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darling contains ten darkly funny short stories by Maura Stanton. Anything can happen in this swiftly narrated book, which provides glimpses of Gertrude Stein playing Ping-Pong with a G.I. in Paris during World War II, a famous contemporary writer giving a haircut in a bar in Eureka, California, and Katherine Mansfield struggling to write her final stories in Montana, Switzerland.Stanton introduces the reader to other unforgettable characters, such as a girl with a clown phobia who falls in love with Joujou the clown , and a woman who discovers that her dead sister has written a bad novel. The settings of Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darling are as varied as the characters. A basket of steamed crabs might show up on a kitchen table in Baltimore; arctic air might freeze nose hairs in Minnesota; a blizzard might isolate a town in Nebraska; rain might cancel a rock concert in the Alps.The characters in Stanton's lively stories try to sort out their lives by telling stories or listening closely to the stories of other people. Two sisters interrogate each other about different versions of the party that changed their lives forever. A young woman entertains and shocks her friends in a café with a funny story about her first love affair. A landlady tries to reconstruct the life of a Sicilian immigrant whose ashes she finds in a trailer.In capturing with wit and sensitivity the struggles of its characters to make sense of the many strange and ordinary occurrences of everyday life, Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darling reminds us that we are all, in some sense, characters in many of life's different stories.This memorable collection is the 2002 winner of the Richard Sullivan Prize in Short Fiction.

Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darling contains ten darkly funny short stories by Maura Stanton. Anything can happen in this swiftly narrated book, which provides glimpses of Gertrude Stein playing Ping-Pong with a G.I. in Paris during World War II, a famous contemporary writer giving a haircut in a bar in Eureka, California, and Katherine Mansfield struggling to write her final stories in Montana, Switzerland.Stanton introduces the reader to other unforgettable characters, such as a girl with a clown phobia who falls in love with Joujou the clown , and a woman who discovers that her dead sister has written a bad novel. The settings of Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darling are as varied as the characters. A basket of steamed crabs might show up on a kitchen table in Baltimore; arctic air might freeze nose hairs in Minnesota; a blizzard might isolate a town in Nebraska; rain might cancel a rock concert in the Alps.The characters in Stanton's lively stories try to sort out their lives by telling stories or listening closely to the stories of other people. Two sisters interrogate each other about different versions of the party that changed their lives forever. A young woman entertains and shocks her friends in a café with a funny story about her first love affair. A landlady tries to reconstruct the life of a Sicilian immigrant whose ashes she finds in a trailer.In capturing with wit and sensitivity the struggles of its characters to make sense of the many strange and ordinary occurrences of everyday life, Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darling reminds us that we are all, in some sense, characters in many of life's different stories.This memorable collection is the 2002 winner of the Richard Sullivan Prize in Short Fiction.

In Cities in the Sea, Maura Stanton taps into the mysterious force of the fairy tale, with its fantastic images and magical narrative patterns. Her stories blur the boundaries between fairy tale and verité, and comment on the art of storytelling. A range of characters—from a business man to a pianist, from a county coroner to a hardware store clerk, from a Greek immigrant to a Danish artist—come to discover that the past is a ruined kingdom, lost forever, but still a place to visit in wish, dream, and memory. Throughout her stories, Stanton attempts to wrest a deeper pattern, full of humor and wonder, out of the disturbing events of contemporary life.