When Watched ─ Stories

A sly, provocative, and psychologically astute debut story collection from a 2015 Whiting Writers’ Award winner
 
Two young college dropouts find complicated solace in each other’s company while working as prostitutes in Tribeca; a long-married pair of poets takes a road trip and angrily reaffirms longstanding suspicions; two young women go home together after meeting in AA and explain themselves to one another in unequal terms; a young woman and her much older, more renowned partner adopt a puppy in distant Pennsylvania, as knots of their relationship come into harsh view en route; a woman writes an urgent fan letter to George Harrison.
 
Leopoldine Core’s stories explore themes of attachment, longing, and sexuality that are animated by a variety of contrasting extremes: hysteria and repression, approach and retreat, obsessive desire and repulsion. Her characters live in and around a New York on the edge of the abyss in a stunted quest for something like peace. While they may seem to operate at the margins, there is something eminently relatable, even elemental about their romantic relationships, their personal demons, and the strange shapes their joy can take. Written with poetic insight, biting humor, and profound sympathy, Core’s stories announce the arrival of a writer unafraid of exploring the darkest corners of the human psyche.

Leopoldine Core was born and raised in New York and attended Hunter College. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in theParis Review Daily, Open City, the Drunken Boat, and the Brooklyn Rail, among others. In 2012, she was an Emerging Writers Fellow at the Center for Fiction and fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. The author of the 2015 poetry chapbookVeronica Bench, Core lives in New York.