Stories by Emily Carter

September 1, 2000 • 5.5 x 8.5 • 192 pages • 978-1-56689-101-1

An ironic, streetwise journey through disease, despair, sex, and addiction.

How is a woman in her thirties, HIV-positive and fresh out of rehab, supposed to find love and work in contemporary, urban America, steering clear of self-pity and doctrinaire “happy-talk”? This linked short story collection shows how Glory goes and gets some.

Emily Carter’s impressive debut traces one woman’s journey from town houses on Park Avenue and apartments on the Lower East Side, to Minnesota’s recovery community of boarding-houses in blighted urban neighborhoods and well-funded treatment centers in bucolic pastures.

Glory Goes and Gets Some is a streetwise and sardonic look at sex, HIV, addiction, and recovery. From her patrician childhood on the Upper East Side, to her chemical addictions downtown, to her unlikely, tenuous, yet rewarding alliances with the full range of treatment mavens in the Midwest, Glory gives us an uncensored and irreverent account of her experiences in twelve-step recovery—a process that, for all its faults, ultimately works for her. “That first six months, there were an awful lot of people I met who talked the talk, all the time. Their faces seemed to glow, and they’d go on about so-and-so ‘getting it,’ ‘getting’ the program, having that much-touted aura of serenity about them. It was my experience that such persons usually relapsed and stole their roommate’s stereo equipment, or charged five thousand dollars worth of lingerie at Neiman Marcus.”

About the Author

Emily Carter is the author of Glory Goes and Gets Some. Her work has received many awards and fellowships, including the Loft/McKnight Award, a Bush Grant, and a National Magazine Award. Her writing has appeared in Story Magazine, Gathering of the Tribes, Between C & D, Artforum, Open City, Great River Review, and POZ Magazine, for which she was the cover subject of the 1998 summer fiction issue. Glory Goes and Gets Some features stories that were originally published in the New Yorker, and the title story was selected by Garrison Keillor for The Best American Short Stories 1998. Emily Carter lives in Minneapolis.

Thanks to a 2013 ADA Access Improvement Grant administered by VSA Minnesota for the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, this title is also formatted for screen readers which make text accessible to the blind and visually impaired. To purchase this title for use with a screen reader please call (612) 338-0125 or email us at info@coffeehousepress.org.

Reviews

“Emily Carter has a completely original voice. It is sassy and tragic simultaneously. And it is true.” —Erica Jong

“Carter has an original and offbeat style that gives Glory’s voice a jangled lyricism. Less of a poetry slam than a nudge, this gentle novel is studded with examples of Glory’s lush vision.” —San Francisco Chronicle