Stories by Emily Carter
September 1, 2000 5.5 x 8.5 192 pages 978-1-56689-101-1
An ironic, streetwise journey through disease, despair, sex, and addiction.
How is a woman in her thirties, HIV-positive and fresh out of rehab, supposed to find love and work in contemporary, urban America, steering clear of self-pity and doctrinaire happy-talk? This linked short story collection shows how Glory goes and gets some.
Emily Carters impressive debut traces one womans journey from town houses on Park Avenue and apartments on the Lower East Side, to Minnesotas recovery community of boarding-houses in blighted urban neighborhoods and well-funded treatment centers in bucolic pastures.
Glory Goes and Gets Some is a streetwise and sardonic look at sex, HIV, addiction, and recovery. From her patrician childhood on the Upper East Side, to her chemical addictions downtown, to her unlikely, tenuous, yet rewarding alliances with the full range of treatment mavens in the Midwest, Glory gives us an uncensored and irreverent account of her experiences in twelve-step recoverya process that, for all its faults, ultimately works for her. That first six months, there were an awful lot of people I met who talked the talk, all the time. Their faces seemed to glow, and theyd go on about so-and-so getting it, getting the program, having that much-touted aura of serenity about them. It was my experience that such persons usually relapsed and stole their roommates stereo equipment, or charged five thousand dollars worth of lingerie at Neiman Marcus.
About the Author
Emily Carter is the author of Glory Goes and Gets Some. Her work has received many awards and fellowships, including the Loft/McKnight Award, a Bush Grant, and a National Magazine Award. Her writing has appeared in Story Magazine, Gathering of the Tribes, Between C & D, Artforum, Open City, Great River Review, and POZ Magazine, for which she was the cover subject of the 1998 summer fiction issue. Glory Goes and Gets Some features stories that were originally published in the New Yorker, and the title story was selected by Garrison Keillor for The Best American Short Stories 1998. Emily Carter lives in Minneapolis.