Squandering the Blue

An uncompromising and sensually charged collection from one of the great practitioners of the short story.

Squandering the Blue is Kate Braverman’s debut story collection, a fierce, hallucinatory vision of Southern California and the women who move through its heat, glamour, and wreckage. Set among artists, addicts, lovers, and drifters, these interconnected stories form a vivid patchwork of lives caught between longing and self-destruction, where affection and addiction are often inseparably entwined.

Across brief, haunting snapshots, Braverman captures women at moments of fracture and transformation: an art-world satire that becomes a feminist post-nuclear parable in “Falling in October”; a woman struggling to break free from an abusive relationship in “Points of Decision”; and, in the widely anthologized “Tall Tales from the Mekong Delta,” a recovering alcoholic navigating motherhood, sobriety, and a dangerously seductive stranger.

At once raw, lyrical, and unsparing, Squandering the Blue explores how people shape—or bury—their own experiences while living in the long shadow of a better life just out of reach.

“If, as they say, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, it stands to reason that horror, too, lurks deep within the optic nerve. How else to explain the lushly menacing imagery in the poet and novelist Kate Braverman’s latest book?” —The New York TimesKATE BRAVERMAN (1949–2019) was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet. Born in Philadelphia, Braverman moved to Los Angeles in 1958. Braverman was a member of the Venice Poetry Workshop, and was a professor of creative writing at California State University, Los Angeles, and a member of the faculty of the UCLA Writers' Program. Braverman’s fiction won her an O. Henry Award and a Carver Short Story Award, in addition to the Economist Prize and an Isherwood Fellowship. Her works include four novels (Lithium for Medea, 1979; Palm Latitudes, 1988; Wonders of the West, 1993; and The Incantation of Frida K, 2001) as well as four poetry collections, three short story collections, and a memoir. Her story collection Squandering the Blue was first published by Fawcett Columbine/Ballantine in 1990.