Objects of Desire

CLARE SESTANOVICH, named a "5 Under 35" honoree by the National Book Foundation in 2022, is a fiction writer whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Harper's, The Drift, and Electric Literature. Objects of Desire, a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, is her first collection. She lives in Brooklyn.

Eleven stories that lay bare the beauties and ironies of contemporary life--a debut of sly and disarming power that announces an extraordinary new literary voiceA college freshman, flying home, strikes up an odd, ephemeral friendship with the couple next to her on the airplane. A long-lost stepbrother's visit to New York prompts a reckoning with a family's old taboos. An office worker, exhausted by the ambitions of the men around her, emerges into the gridlocked city one afternoon to make a decision. A wife, looking at her husband's passwords neatly posted on the wall, realizes there are no secrets left in their marriage.In these stories, thrilling desire and melancholic yearning animate women's lives--from the brink of adulthood, to the labyrinthine path between twenty and thirty, to middle age, when certain possibilities quietly elapse. With elegant precision, powerful observation, and mordant humor, Clare Sestanovich brings us a fictional world remarkably true to life, where uncomfortable truths are hidden in plain sight. Objects of Desire is a book pulsing with subtle drama, rich with unforgettable scenes, and alive with moments of recognition each more startling than the last--a spellbinding, brilliant debut.