Likes is the latest publication from National Book Award finalist Sarah Shun-lien Bynum. The collection, which marks her highly anticipated return after ten years, weaves together like and unlike, mythic and modern, for a wildly original blending of the real with the fantastic that won her acclaim for her previous work.
Bynum discussed writing Likes with author Brandon Taylor whose novel Real Life made the long list for the 2020 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize.
Featured Book
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Likes
By Sarah Shun-lien Bynum
Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
In nine stories that range from the real to the unreal, strange to familiar, funny to frightening, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum reminds us why her wildly original debut, Madeleine Is Sleeping, and her masterful Ms. Hempel Chronicles have become contemporary classics—celebrated and beloved.
In a nimble dance of lightness and gravity, Likes explores the full range and contradictions of our contemporary moment. Through unexpected visitors, Waldorf school fairs, aging indie-film stars, the struggle to gain a foothold in the capitalist shell-game of work, the Instagram posts of a twelve-year-old—these stories of friendship and parenthood, celebrity and obsession, race and class and the passage of time, form an engrossing collection that is both otherworldly and suffused with the deceitful humdrum of everyday life.
For readers of Joy Williams, George Saunders, Lauren Groff, and Deborah Eisenberg, Likes helps us see into our unacknowledged desires and, in quick, artful, nearly invisible cuts, exposes the roots of our abiding terrors and delights.
