The Littlest Matryoshka by Corinne Demas Bliss

The Donkeys Postpone Gratification (poetry collection), Finishing Line Press, 2009.The Writing Circle (novel), Hyperion/Voice, July 2010.Everything I Was (YA novel), Carolrhoda Lab/Lerner Publishing Group, 2011.Returning to Shore (YA novel), Carolrhoda Lab/Lerner Publishing Group, 2014.National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships.Breakthrough Contest winner, University of Missouri Press.Lawrence Foundation Prize for the best story to appear in Michigan Quarterly Review.PEN Syndicated Fiction Competition winner.Finalist, Massachusetts Book Award 2001, The Disappearing Island.ASPCA Henry Bergh Children’s Book Award for Saying Goodbye to Lulu.Aesthetica Creative Writing Award, Fiction Winner 2015.She resides in Western Massachusetts and on Cape Cod. A Fiction Editor of The Massachusetts Review, she is a member of The Authors Guild, PEN, and the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators. In 1978 she moved to New England and began teaching at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts, where she is now Professor of English. She lived in Pittsburgh for a decade, teaching at the University of Pittsburgh and at Chatham College. in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She attended Hunter College High School, graduated from Tufts University, and completed a Ph.D. (Apr.Corinne Demas grew up in New York City, in Stuyvesant Town, the subject of her memoir, Eleven Stories High, Growing Up in Stuyvesant Town, 1948-1968. Imbued with an awareness of the precariousness of security, these stories make unsettling, poignant reading. Intense childhood experiences-a brother-sister canoe trip that turns perilous, a sister's last, emotion-fraught Christmas at home before leaving for college-segue into family myth even as they occur. Another woman understands in retrospect the suppressed passion she glimpsed as a child between her father and a female colleague. The past and present fuse, as when a woman's childhood recollection of her mother's momentary hesitation before going to the aid of her injured son is superimposed on the reality of the demanding, ailing mother for whom she now cares. A newspaper editor befriends a child who seems intentionally lost and in a tacit collusion with her mother to find a more loving home. Vacationers are mistaken for honeymooners even as the woman grieves over the death of her young daughter. In one a happily married woman finds her birthday given a sharp edge of pleasurable regret by the card that arrives each year from a former lover. Throughout these bittersweet tales, women's past losses linger as a white noise in the background of otherwise fulfilled lives.

The Littlest Matryoshka by Corinne Demas Bliss