All Fall Down

Enthralling stories of desire and dissolution from “one of our great national literary treasures.”

In this long-awaited collection which includes two novellas and four shorter tales of love and healing gone awry, we meet caregivers and lovers, muses and skydivers, mothers and minors—all headed toward “ninety mile-an-hour psychic crashes euphemistically referred to as epiphanies.” As William Gass says, “The music of Mary Caponegro’s stories is to the mouth what wine is.” Through exuberant lyricism, remarkable characterization, and settings as elaborately detailed as any in Hollywood, these dramas of failure, resilience, and transformation linger long after the wine is gone.

Publication date: July 1, 2009

Format: Trade Paper

Dimensions: 6 x 9

Page count: 224 pages

ISBN: 9781566892261

Mary Caponegro is the author of The Star Café, The Complexities of Intimacy, and All Fall Down, among other collections of short fiction. Her stories have been anthologized in The Anchor Book of New American Fiction, The Italian American Reader, and Wild Dreams: The Best of Italian Americana. Born in Brooklyn, she has lived in Italy, and now resides in New York’s Hudson Valley, where she is currently the Richard B. Fisher Family Professor in Literature and Writing at Bard College and contributing editor of Conjunctions.

“Mary Caponegro is one of the most imaginative, daring, serious and playful writers alive. All Fall Down is her best book yet.”

—Jonathan Safran Foer

“Mary Caponegro’s headlong tales chronicle our generation’s internal trajectories; she’s robust, crude, drop-dead funny, tender, and heartbreaking as she navigates the tragicomedy of our middle age. She goes straight to the bottom of sex, love, romance, and all their travesties. The way David Foster Wallace used and claimed and forever changed footnotes, Caponegro has branded parentheses. She charts the ‘oldly-wed game’ of the long married using ‘not a laugh but a cry-track.’ Playful, but never shirking, Caponegro’s stories are a deep balm.”

—Mona Simpson