So We Can Glow
Stories
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About this listen
A lush, glittering short story collection exploring female obsession and desire by an award-winning author Roxane Gay calls "a consummate storyteller."
From Kentucky to the California desert, these 42 short stories - ranging from the '80s and '90s to present day - expose the hearts of girls and women in moments of obsessive desire and fantasy, wildness and bad behavior, brokenness and fearlessness, and more.
On a hot July night, teenage girls sneak out of the house to meet their boyfriends by the train tracks. Members of a cult form an unsettling chorus as they proclaim their adoration for the same man. A woman luxuriates in a fantasy getaway to escape her past. A love story begins over cabbages in a grocery store, and a laundress' life is consumed by her obsession with a baseball star. After the death of a sister, two high school friends kiss all night and binge-watch Winona Ryder movies.
Leesa Cross-Smith's sensuous stories - some long, some gone in a flash, some told over text and emails - drench listeners in nostalgia for summer nights and sultry days. They recall the intense friendships of teenage girls and the innate bonds between mothers, the first heady rush of desire, and the pure exhilaration of womanhood, all while holding up the wild souls of women so they can catch the light.
©2020 Leesa Cross-Smith (P)2020 Grand Central PublishingListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
"Leesa Cross-Smith writes the way many people wish they could: ferociously, tenderly, and with a tremendous amount of heart. The stories contained in So We Can Glow showcase the very best of Cross-Smith's voice. They stick with readers long after the book is closed. This collection is tantalizing and Cross-Smith is a delight." (Kristen Arnett, New York Times best-selling author of Mostly Dead Things)
"Leesa Cross-Smith is such a beguiling writer and her skills are on full display in So We Can Glow. These are stories about breathless love, lustful abandon, all that glitters, hot summers, cool pavement, sticky skin, beautifully beating hearts. There is such authenticity to these stories and nostalgia that is tempered with just enough of a clear-eyed understanding of the world as it is, not just how we hoped it might be. It's also refreshing to see a writer crafting stories that are so unapologetically for women, about women, a love letter to who we are, the best and worst of us, held high and true, so we can glow as brightly as we dare." (Roxane Gay, New York Times best-selling author)
"The magic of So We Can Glow is that no matter who you are, no matter your circumstances, no matter your gender identity, when reading this book you become the girls and women in these pages. You hope their hopes, dream their dreams, fantasize and love alongside them. Leesa Cross-Smith is some sort of sorceress." (Rion Amilcar Scott, PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize-winning author of Insurrections and The World Doesn't Require You)
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Story
In this breathtakingly inventive autobiographical novel, Eileen Myles transforms life into a work of art. Told in her audacious voice, made vivid and immediate in her lyrical language, Chelsea Girls cobbles together memories of Myles's 1960s Catholic upbringing with an alcoholic father, her volatile adolescence, her unabashed "lesbianity," and her riotous pursuit of survival as a poet in 1970s New York.
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fascinatingly skanky
- By Megon J. Walker on 07-15-16
By: Eileen Myles
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Orange Mint and Honey
- By: Carleen Brice
- Narrated by: Cherise Booth
- Length: 8 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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After grad school, Shay Dixon feels like she's had enough for awhile. Inspired by her spiritual adviser - a soul-soothing blues player named Nina Simon - Shay calls her estranged mother Nona for the first time in years, and shocks herself by asking if it would be okay to come home for a while.
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One For The Money
- By DiaRose on 09-25-17
By: Carleen Brice
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The Bitter and Sweet of Cherry Season
- By: Molly Fader
- Narrated by: Nancy Peterson
- Length: 9 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Everything Hope knows about the Orchard House is from the stories of her late mother. So when she arrives at the northern Michigan family estate late one night with a terrible secret and her 10-year-old daughter in tow, she’s not sure if she’ll be welcomed or turned away with a shotgun by the aunt she has never met.
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Really Enjoyed It
- By Kathryn @theBookDate on 03-30-21
By: Molly Fader
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Saguaro
- By: Carson Mell
- Narrated by: Carson Mell
- Length: 3 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Saguaro chronicles the life of rock legend Bobby Bird as he finds himself rolled up in barbiturates, at sea with satanic cults, finding true love, selling out, and coming back. Bird may be many things - a legend in pink cotton, a living history in tattoos, the very embodiment of rock and roll - but he isn’t a bad man. At least not all the time. He made his name as a crooner, revered as a singer with soul, a soul he quickly sold without ever considering the implications.
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Animal Cruelty Warning
- By AJLecter on 02-06-23
By: Carson Mell
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The Mother Next Door
- A Novel of Suspense
- By: Tara Laskowski
- Narrated by: Andi Arndt, Teri Schnaubelt, Emily Lawrence
- Length: 8 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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The annual Halloween block party is the pinnacle of the year on idyllic suburban cul-de-sac Ivy Woods Drive. An influential group of neighborhood moms—known as the Ivy Five—plans the event for months. Except the Ivy Five has been four for a long time. When a new mother moves to town, eager to fit in, the moms see it as an opportunity to make the group whole again. This year's block party should be the best yet... until the women start receiving anonymous messages threatening to expose the quiet neighborhood's dark past—and the lengths they've gone to hide it.
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I Didn't Want It to End!
- By Sally on 10-16-21
By: Tara Laskowski
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The Pull of the Moon
- By: Elizabeth Berg
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Berg
- Length: 4 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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In the middle of her life, Nan decides to leave her husband at home and begin an impromptu trek across the country, carrying with her a turquoise leather journal she intends to fill. The Pull of the Moon is a novel about a woman coming to terms with issues of importance to all women. In her journal, Nan addresses the thorniness - and the allure - of marriage, the sweet ties to children, and the gifts and lessons that come from random encounters.
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For women over 50
- By Laura on 07-07-15
By: Elizabeth Berg
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Marlena
- A Novel
- By: Julie Buntin
- Narrated by: Emma Galvin
- Length: 9 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Everything about 15-year-old Cat's new town in rural Michigan is lonely and off-kilter until she meets her neighbor, the manic, beautiful, pill-popping Marlena. Cat, inexperienced and desperate for connection, is quickly lured into Marlena's orbit by little more than an arched eyebrow and a shake of white-blond hair. As the two girls turn the untamed landscape of their desolate small town into a kind of playground, Cat catalogues a litany of firsts - first drink, first cigarette, first kiss - while Marlena's habits harden and calcify.
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A Brilliant, Agonizing Portrait of a Young Woman
- By Sudi on 06-06-17
By: Julie Buntin