Radical Empathy

In this new collection of short stories that Ben Fountain declares "all marvels," Robin Romm (author of The Mercy Papers) revels in the mess behind the slick veneer of modern life. A financially-strapped college student sells her sought after "Ivy League eggs" to a movie star, then wrestles with her feelings as the child grows up in the public eye. A long-married wife in the midst of a bungled kitchen remodel imagines the excitement of her neighbor's unstable erotic life. Isolated by quarantine, a young widow contends with a talking daffodil that panders to her in therapy-speak. Disquieting, original and strangely reassuring, these ten new stories make quick work of the easy truths and thoughtless salvos that keep us from seeing the wildness of our irreducible lives.

The stories in Radical Empathy throb and thrum with the heartbeat of life as it is lived at its truest, most deeply moving level. Romm's prose is so exquisite it induces goosebumps. Absolutely haunting.
--Eileen Pollack

The ten stories--all marvels--in Robin Romm's Radical Empathy establish once and for all that she's a master of the short story. In switchblade-wicked prose, Romm conjures the realities of love, marriage, parenthood, and work so vividly that they bust the bounds of what passes for safely "normal." A beautiful, brilliant, devastating collection.
--Ben Fountain

What terrific stories these are. I kept admiring--in every single one--the rare, sheer power of imagination that takes the familiar and half-known to the rugged territory of the dazzling. I learned from these.
--Joan Silber

Robin Romm is the author of two short story collections, The Mother Garden, and Radical Empathy; a chapbook of stories, The Tilt; as well as a memoir, The Mercy Papers (a New York Times Notable Book). She also compiled and edited the essay collection, Double Bind: Women on Ambition. She's been awarded an O'Henry Prize in short fiction, and was a finalist for the Pen USA prize for her first collection. Her journalism and nonfiction writing have appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, Wired, O Magazine, Parents, and Slate. She lives in Portland, Oregon, with her partner, the writer Don Waters, and their two spitfire daughters.

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