Ancestry

“These exquisite stories showcase Eileen O’Leary’s prodigious talent and singular voice. Ancestry is rich with humor and pathos, and features some of the sharpest dialogue I’ve ever read. An absolute delight.”—Kirstin Chen, author, Bury What We Cannot Take

“Ancestry takes us on a dazzlingly eclectic ride alongside a cast of human beings trying, with varying degrees of desperation, to simply live lives worth living. One hears hints of George Saunders here, but also Deborah Eisenberg and Ann Beattie: narratives with the clarity of a ringing bell simultaneously garbed in a complexity that feels imminent and irreversible. O’Leary is a talent not to be missed.”—Christian Kiefer, author, Phantoms

“‘He would adjust,’ Eileen O’Leary writes of a grieving newcomer to Nepal, in this compassionate and continent-spanning collection. ‘He would learn the customs and some words and a way to get around. Wasn’t that what people did?’ It’s what O’Leary’s people do; confronted with the gulf between dreams and reality, they bend but for the most part don’t break.”—Tom Drury, judge, John Simmons Short Fiction Award

“Witty yet tender, Ancestry is a remarkable collection. It subtly explores the dark matter at the center of every life, asking the wicked and important questions. The answers startle and uplift—they remind us how large every human heart is.”—Derek Palacio, author, The Mortifications

“Eileen O’Leary is a connoisseur of the endlessly clever, endlessly futile ways we try to escape ourselves. With wit as crisp as a dry martini, she sees right through us—parents and children, divorces and dinner parties, paper-thin identities, the giddy free-fall of psychic disintegration—and surgically extracts these elegant and companionable reports of private apocalypse.”—Brian Conn, author, The Fixed Stars