Sara Jaffe's stories casually sidestep the conventional to create something revelatory and fresh. The stories in this collection explore the textures and tensions of contemporary life, pressing on our ambivalence, how we belong to but differ from the world around us. In Hurricane Envy, characters struggle to be perceived by others as they perceive themselves—as an authentic artist, a "good white person," a legitimate parent. Jaffe brings her keen eye and her formal ingenuity to subjects that range from queer parenting, to the rise of the algorithm in the music industry, to gentrification and institutional claims on art, to post-punk culture, anti-Zionist Jewish identity, the rhetoric and realities of American safety. Hurricane Envy, the highly anticipated follow-up to Jaffe's beloved novel Dryland, shows a writer in the fullness of her craft and insight. With humor and meticulous care, Jaffe celebrates and unsettles our desires, our self-knowledge—sentence by sentence, these stories find new possibilities within what we already know.
Sara Jaffe is a writer, educator, and musician living in Portland, OR. Hurricane Envy is her second book. Dryland, a novel, was published by Tin House Books and Cipher Press (UK ). Her short fiction, essays, and criticism have appeared in publications including Joyland, Fence, BOMB, NOON, and Maggot Brain. She co-edited The Art of Touring (Yeti, 2009), an anthology of writing and visual art by musicians drawing on her experience as guitarist for post-punk band Erase Errata. She is a proudly anti-Zionist Jew working for Palestinian liberation.
"These stories crackle and hum, bristle and buzz; they charge the air with their characters' queer wants while asking and showing what stories—and music—can do. And the prose! Each finely tuned sentence of this superbly crafted and disarmingly funny book delivers some jolt or delight. An outstanding collection by one of my favorite writers." — MEGAN MILKS, Author of Slug and Other Stories
"God this is good. Sara Jaffe—I knew already from her exquisitely subtle novel of young queer adolescence, Dryland—is the maestro of rendering what it means to be misperceived. If her narrators in Hurricane Envy have grown some, have found themselves and organized their lives according to their inmost convictions and their agonizingly niche proclivities, their basic plight is the same (the same for all of us?): to attract notice or to escape notice—or, narrowly, both. The giggle to heart-pang ratio here is expertly one-to-one, and both columns of the ledger are brimming. Brilliant." — BRIAN BLANCHFIELD, Author of Proxies: Essays Near Knowing
"Sara Jaffe's stories are sharp-witted, unusual, and surprising. Jaffe finds the odd moment, the change of circumstance, the imperfect setting—a bar and a baby, say—to play havoc with expectations. Her stories delight me." — LYNNE TILLMAN, Author of Thrilled to Death
