“Early in reading The Presentation on Egypt, I came across a moment of such pure narrative electricity, I knew then that I would go on to read everything else Camille Bordas had written.”—Parker Tarun, Washington Square Review
“Camille Bordas writes toward the quiet pressure points—the joke with a bruise under it, the love that won’t behave, the losses that don’t end when the funeral does. The prose is exact, unshowy, funny when it hurts to be, and tender without asking for mercy. These stories don’t close so much as continue inside you. They tilt the world and don’t set it back, leaving you to live with the shift.”—Morgan Talty, author of Fire Exit and Night of the Living Rez
“Bordas’s narrators share a particular sensibility—smart, mordantly funny, and sharp-eyed about contemporary life on both sides of the Atlantic—but the stories themselves never land where you might expect. I hope this is the first of many collections, because I want to be reading Bordas for the rest of my life.”—Nell Freudenberger, author of The Limits and Lucky Girls
“[Bordas’s stories are] perfectly formed marvels, funny, skeptical, self-aware, and humane. I love them for their seeming lightness: there [is] clearly a super-keen intellect at work, but one keen and confident enough to express itself as simply as possible, to let itself be fully metabolized by the story, with no showy remainder.”—Adam Ehrlich Sachs, Literary Hub
“Bordas probes her privileged characters’ existential dread in this masterful collection. . . . Distinguished by the author’s sly wit and complex understanding of the human condition, these stories leave a mark.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Sublime . . . With sharp humor, Bordas’ stories reveal the fragile seams in her characters’ current states while also nimbly exposing the peculiarities of human nature.”—Booklist
“A dozen stories brimming with life, each as unpredictable as a chain of thoughts . . . Bordas’s stories don’t defy summary so much as they chortle at it. . . . Bordas is a master vivisectionist of inner life. . . . There’s nothing here that feels finessed or artificed. Bordas’s characters don’t feel real because the author has ingeniously lined up precisely the right details to convey an essence, to convey a message; they feel real because no matter what these characters see or do, what contingencies or oddities or incoherences loom into view, they respond in authentically idiosyncratic ways. . . . Utterly delightful.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review
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