Could You Be with Her Now

This collection of two novellas showcases Jen Michalski’s varying skills as a writer. In “I Can Make It to California Before It’s Time for Dinner,” Michalski examines the dangers of living in a world while having a compromised reality. In a first-person narrative, the reader follows Jimmy, a mentally challenged fourteen-year-old boy who accidentally kills a neighborhood girl. He winds up running away and hitching a ride with a trucker who is not as trustworthy a companion as Jimmy believes him to be. In “May-September,” which won first place in Press 53’s Open Awards in 2010, a young writer is hired by a much older woman over the summer to help blog her memoirs for her grandchildren. An unlikely friendship, and more, follows, as Michalski examines one of the last cultural taboos of our age: same-sex May-December romances.

“Jen is an astonishingly sensitive writer.”—HTML Giant

“The two very different styles in Could You Be With Her Now not only make the case for the novella as a form, but also for Michalski as a wise writer and a master stylist.”
—Baltimore City Paper

“Jen Michalski explores what it means to be vulnerable in a modern society.”
—Little Patuxent Review

“This is an admirable and original book. Michalski is a skilled storyteller.”
—Chamber Four

“. . . the book feels like a tour de force statement on how—and why—novellas continue to be written.”
—Baltimore Fishbowl