Showing results by narrator "Susan Minot" in All Categories

Ivy Cooper is 52 years old when Ansel Fleming first walks into her life. Twenty years her junior, a musician newly released from prison on a minor drug charge, Ansel’s beguiling good looks and quiet intensity instantly seduce her. Despite the gulf between their ages and experience the physical chemistry between them is overpowering, and over the heady weeks and months that follow Ivy finds her life bifurcated by his presence.

Using a single interlude—a brief encounter of old lovers, two bodies entwined on a bed at midday—Minot defines the distance that erupts at what seems to be the height of connection, as well as the extent to which the senses deceive, and the intensely private eroticism of fantasy and the imagination. Minot’s lovers are mesmerizing in their individual journeys—one moving toward a kind of holy consummation, the other toward abnegation and blank despair.

The author of Monkeys and Evening focuses her observant eye and lyrical voice on the delicate emotional negotiations of young New Yorkers. As in a series of deceptively simple watercolors, these stories uncover small moments that yield larger truths—about the ways in which women and men come together and come apart again, about the disappointments and hopes of lovers who know what they want but don’t always know how to keep.