Better Times: Short Stories

Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, the stories in Better Times focus on what’s happening in places people don’t think to look. Women, sometimes displaced, often lonely, are at the heart of these stories. In Better Times Sara Batkie focuses on the moments in women’s lives when the wider world is wrapped up in other matters: a father and daughter, separated by time and an ocean, dreaming of each other; a girl in a home for “troubled women” imagining the journey of the first dog in space; a phantom breast returning to haunt a woman after her mastectomy; a young woman giving birth to a litter of eggs. Such are the ordinary women weathering extraordinary circumstances in Better Times.Divided into three sections covering the recent past, our current era, and the world to come, the stories gathered here-with characters stymied by loneliness, motherhood, illness, even cataclysmic climate change-interrogate the idea that so-called better times ever existed, particularly for women.

Reviews of Better Times: Short Stories

"In her debut collection, Sara Batkie displays the inventive brio of Karen Russell and the omnivorous range of Jim Shepard. Artfully crafted and tenderly told, these stories will break your heart and set fire to your imagination."-Jon Michaud, author of When Tito Loved Clara — Jon Michaud "The men and women in Better Times are adrift. Yet they keep looking for ways to connect and love, and each of Sara Batkie's beautiful sentences tethers them more deeply, to the reader's heart and our collective human soul."-Hannah Tinti, author of The Good Thief and The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley — Hannah Tinti "These stories are epic in scope with a frank beauty that embellishes the book's stirring insights. A debut of gems, Batkie's work is important fun."-Seth Fried, author of The Great Frustration — Seth Fried "Better Times is a book of quiet passions, narrated with grace. In these nine finely observed stories Batkie explores with empathy the impolite agonies that change the gravity of her characters' worlds."-Tracy O'Neill, author of The Hopeful? — Tracy O'Neill "With a controlled ferocity of perception, Sara Batkie lays bare a world in which all of us are spies and strangers, both to one another and ourselves. She's a kind of Jean Rhys for our time, and this is a haunting first collection."-Brian Morton, author of Florence Gordon and Starting Out in the Evening — Brian Morton "Sara Batkie is a writer for our times: lyrical and smart, clear-eyed and true. Better Times may portend just that-better times, at least for literature, in these dark hours."-Darin Strauss, author of Half a Life, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award — Darin Strauss