Fabrications

"Pamela Painter's stories abound with characters that linger, moments that enlighten. She is a master of the American short story and Fabrications is a triumphant book."—Pablo Medina, author of The Cuban Comedy

"For the past forty-five years, Pamela Painter has written some of the finest short stories anywhere, and Fabrications is a treasure chest filled with her very best. Witty, moving, wise, and elegant, these stories are gems."—Steve Yarbrough, author of The Unmade World

"[Painter's] latest stories, the ones that make up the opening section of her recently released Fabrications: New and Selected Stories (Johns Hopkins University Press), would in and of themselves constitute ample reason to buy and enjoy the book. But in fact, Fabrications draws from her entire career, giving us the finest stories from her four previous collections."—Steve Yarbrough , Fiction Writer's Review

"A great pleasure of Fabrications—and one of the most unusual aspects of the collection—is the variety of forms [used], from very short stories like "Dud"—in which a film editor creates a brilliant preview out of a terrible film—to much more expansive stories like "Her Elvis Presley Wedding.""—Margot Livesay, Lit Hub

"There are 31 stories in this collection, and I think each is a gem. Plunge headfirst into its pages and read right through or savor the stories slowly over time. There's a Painterly quality to it all. You've entered the house of a master, and you are safe in her hands"—Sherrie Flick, SmokeLong Quarterly

"Few writers can generate as much tension in so few pages as Painter . . . Painter's art lies in how she so efficiently dramatizes how foolishly we 'exaggerate, lie, edit.'"—Arts Fuse

"Painter is too wise an artist to conclude that every fabrication, literary or not, must be damaging. Some are downright necessary. Painter's genius for subversion, for skewering her characters with their own self-serving lies and denials, is balanced by awareness of the vulnerabilities that can make reality so hard to bear."—Necessary Fiction