Widow

Pulse[s] with a surprising, offbeat erotic energy.

— Elle

Bracing, exposed, ruthlessly mercurial . . . The writing thrums with aggression and a lush, rooted sensuality . . . the rewards here are enormous.

— New York Times Book Review

Latiolais is as close to Alice Munro as a writer can get, but with a more modern edge to her tone, low graceful notes, not too much flash, perfect restraint and the feeling of contents under pressure.

— Los Angeles Times

Sublime . . . [Latiolais] manages to find something luminous in the broken shards—still sharp, still drawing blood—that remain in the wake of losing what could not feasibly be lost.

— San Francisco Chronicle

The inveterate readers among you may be asking yourselves, do I read this book or Joyce Carol Oates’ book of stories about widows and her recent memoir about widowhood? And I say to you, read them all, but begin first with Michelle Latiolais.

— Alan Cheuse, NPR’s All Things Considered

Latiolais writes about grief in such a raw way—she joins the general pantheon of No-More-Husband literature (high priestess: J-Did), but her style is so unique as to be another genre altogether.

— Rachel Syme @ The Millions

This is an elegant book of stories, precise and glittering, like jewels. Latiolais writes exquisite, mandarin prose, in sentences you want to memorize.

— Roxana Robinson @ National Book Critics Circle’s Critical Mass

Filled with an intensity of vision . . . Latiolais plunges courageously into odd territory, noticing and observing the felt life in precise and often beautiful language.

— Minneapolis Star Tribune

There is poetry in Latiolais’s prose. Charged by memory and the frisson of association, these stories revel in the texture of words, their sounds, their vagaries, their betrayals. . . . offer[ing] pearls rough, mottled, shimmering.

— Los Angeles Review of Books

Latiolais has a supple, sensitive way with words. . . . [Widow] celebrates the Geiger counter aspect of human consciousness that records and overwrites a deep document of self-reflection.

— OC Metro magazine

A short story collection whose writing gives us pleasure in just being in the company of the writer.

— OC Weekly (Required Orange County Reading)

For the intimate ways that it explores the recesses of grief with warmth, earthiness, and humor, Widow is the most emotionally resonant book I’ve read this year.

— Open Letters Monthly

Excellent, heartbreaking . . . reading Widow was a profound experience. . . . [Latiolais] takes the ordinary and shows how it doesn’t exist. There is only the great mystery of the moments of our lives, which can at best turn into vivid memories. And after that? It is that afterlife, the after of all those mysterious, precious moments, that soaks this book. Death, something so final, still remains the unanswerable question that follows our lives, and Latiolias ponders this beautifully, painfully, honestly.

— Nervous Breakdown

Latiolais is bold and frank, and utterly unsentimental. . . . Widow rivets our attention because it offers what all literature, tragic, comical or otherwise, should: a distillation of experience and a concentration of thought that invests a simple moment with all the profundity of existence itself.

— ZYZZYVA

All is certainly not gloom and doom in these imaginative tales . . . Widow is an enjoyable read, especially since Latiolais is such an accomplished lover of the written word. Though the stories amply reflect the shattering and paralysing loss of widows, they are not depressing.

— Belletrista: Celebrating Women Writers from Around the World

As humans face death – our own or our most beloved – the best writers have the ability to rise up and eloquently sing. I speak, of course, of Joan Didion in The Year of Magical Thinking, of Francisco Goldman in Say Her Name, of David Vann in Legend of a Suicide. And now, Michelle Latiolais takes her place in that very top tier of talented writers. . . . [Widow] positively pulsates with pain and beauty, with heartbreak and reverence, with alienation and survival. In short, it is stunning writing, courageous writing.

— MostlyFiction

Latiolais is not only a good observer of human nature, but a fearless one. It takes a certain bravery to make stories of loneliness, of sadness, of reminiscences, and of contemplation enjoyable to read.

— Lancette Arts Journal (Canada)

Intimate and charged . . . [Latiolais] revels in words and in language, and while saturated in loss, grief, and longing, her prose is also fiercely humorous, angry, sexual, and alive.

— Three Guys One Book

A truly excellent collection of short stories, the best I have read in a long time . . . There is an emotional vitality to them, a clarity of insight, a sense for the ridiculous and the poignant that make them simply truthful and engaging.

— Lit Love: Tales from the Reading Room (UK)

A master of banter, Latiolais is happily bawdy and gorgeously sensual. She is also archly imaginative and psychologically astute.

— Booklist

All who venture here will discover some very fine writing.

— Library Journal

Latiolais uses the finest details to weave strands of hope.

— ForeWord Reviews

Every story in this collection is uniquely enjoyable.

— Shelf Awareness

Totally original . . . the book maintains its sense of literary savoir faire to the end.

— New York Journal of Books

In this luminous collection of stories, the gifted Michelle Latiolais writes of loss in all its surprising manifestations. Widow is a devastation and a wonder.

— Christine Schutt, author of All Souls

There is something mysterious about this book, as there always is in the writing that matters most. It eludes explanation. It illumines terrifying realities. Only because these pages seem nakedly willing to take the imprint of every emotion, no matter how ugly, do they possess this great beauty.

— Elizabeth Tallent, author of Honey

Widow is a hymn to reverence, simultaneously heartbroken and celebratory. Michelle Latiolais has given us the rarest item, a splendidly articulated masterpiece.

— William Kittredge, author of Hole in the Sky and The Nature of Generosity

Every passionate reader lives for that first page of a book that alerts her, straightaway, she’ll be sorry when the book ends. So it is with Michelle Latiolais.

— Antioch Review