Certain People

Roberta Allen presents characters who are never at home in the world, who find in their surroundings “the strangeness” they feel inside themselves.

The thirty-three stories in Certain People are set in Australia and other exotic locales. The first story, “House Hunting,” tells of a successful gentleman who is having a life crisis. His lover has left him for a cook. “The man whose lover left him for a cook” reappears throughout the book, his life slowly crumbling as he recognizes his inability to connect with himself and others. In “The Whore,” a young, beautiful wife is ignored by her husband, who is enthralled by the life stories of a middle-aged prostitute.

Written in a tactile and painterly manner, the author questions the way we perceive our world and self. In these stories, the world is a place of shifting relations where truths are relative. What one person sees is not the same as another. One’s perceptions may change in a flash or not at all. One may cling to people or things long out of sight.

Publication date: February 1, 1996

Format: Trade Paper

Dimensions: 5 x 7.5

Page count: 128 pages

ISBN: 9781566890526

A native New Yorker, Roberta Allen left home at twenty to travel in Europe. She lived and worked in Amsterdam, Athens, and Berlin. Her travels have inspired many of her short stories and several books.

She is the author of two story collections: Certain People and The Traveling Woman, both praised by the New York Times Book Review. Her novella-in-stories, The Daughter, and her novel, The Dreaming Girl, were both praised by the Village Voice. Her stories have appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies. She has taught in the writing program at Columbia University, and in private writers’ workshops since 1991.

“Allen is a visual artist of some renown, as one might guess from her painterly style, which delivers a slashing detail here, a dab of color there, and an economy of line that is frequently wondrous.”

—Steve Almond, Chelsea

“This is a sly, edgy, shrewd book.”

—Robert Polito

“At their best, [Allen's] stories intimately convey the spiritual malaise of people at odds with an alien environment or with their own deeply shrouded impulses.”

—Laura Winters, The New York Times Book Review

"[Allen] holds her characters at a distance, rarely giving them names but instead according them the bemused attention of a good-natured deity.”

—Publishers Weekly