Separate Kingdoms: Stories

“A work of daunting versatility and technical skill, the product of a writer absolutely at home in the language and working vigorously within both new and old forms.” —Michael Byers, author of Long for this World and The Coast of Good Intentions 

From Pushcart Prize-winner Valerie Laken, author of Dream House, comes a riveting short story collection charting the divisions and collisions between cultures and nations, families and lovers, selves and others in the United States and Russia. In the tradition of Lydia Peelle, Barbara Johnson, and David Mitchell, Laken creates incisive and illuminating portraits of characters coping with loss, estrangement, and disability, confined by their circumstances to separate kingdoms of the heart.

From Valerie Laken, the Pushcart Prize–winning author of Dream House, comes a powerful collection of short stories charting the divisions and collisions between cultures and nations, families and outsiders, and partners and misfits searching for love. Set in Russia and the United States, these are boldly innovative stories—tales of fractured, misplaced characters moving beyond the borders of their isolation and reaching for the connections that will make them whole.

A family, shaken by an industrial accident, is divided, its members isolated in their home and only able to understand one another from their separate rooms. A young gay couple travels to Russia to meet the child they're desperately trying to adopt, but the experience reveals an emotional divide between the parents-to-be. A recent amputee removes herself from her body to keep her husband at bay. And the idyllic village life of a blind Russian boy is disrupted by an American dentist and the wonders of racy Western magazines. Separate Kingdoms is a rich and satisfying collection that traverses the distances between people and places in each marvelously rendered story.

“This is a pitch-perfect collection, searching and graceful, containing just the right mixture of intelligence and heart. The separate kingdoms Valerie Laken writes about are not only America and Russia, the countries where her stories take place, but also the innermost minds of any two human beings, and the different ways we experience the world before and after a catastrophe. All of the characters in this book are missing something deeply important to them—children or pets, spells of time or pieces of their own bodies. In Laken’s skillful and compassionate hands, though, they are never less than whole.” - Kevin Brockmeier, author of Things That Fall From the Sky and The Brief History of the Dead

“What I find so striking about this book is the way that separate worlds—seemingly foreign or even bizarre to each other—are brought together and forced to converse, to try to love each other. There is considerable erotic energy in such a meeting. The imagination in these stories often does what it can to heal a wound or a rift, and so the stories often have an amazing poignancy that never lapses into the maudlin.” - Charles Baxter, author of the National Book Award finalist The Feast of Love

“A work of daunting versatility and technical skill, the product of a writer absolutely at home in the language and working vigorously within both new and old forms. . . . This is a writer of wonderful gifts.” - Michael Byers, author of Long for this World and The Coast of Good Intentions

“The perfect haunted house story for these unnerving times. . . . Having assembled the plot machinery for a sturdy thriller, Laken does none of the expected things. Instead, she uses the framework to support an ambitious study of people in search of a home—“home’’ being a metaphor for the elusive something that defines and validates the self.” - New York Times

“Laken is masterful at character construction as she explores issues of race and class and conveys the wreckage of individual lives and the emotions evoked by a house that is the source of joy and dreams as well as the site of tragedy.” - Booklist (starred review)

“A psychologically engrossing novel about the homes we make—in our houses, in our neighborhoods, and in the hearts of our loved ones. Laken takes on that great unspoken American subject—class—and does so with frankness, acuity and surpassing feeling. DREAM HOUSE is a memorable debut novel from a fully mature talent.” - Peter Ho Davies, author of The Welsh Girl

“Loss, temporary and permanent, physical and emotional, is the hard, gleaming thread tying together Laken’s short-story collection. . . . An absorbing literary exploration of the geography of loss.” - Kirkus Reviews

“Laken demonstrates that all of us are in some way isolated from others, trapped in our own thoughts, our own hurts, our own bodies. In setting her stories alternately in Russia and the U.S., Laken shows that borders and oceans create less of a gulf than does the tiny space between two people. Bridging that chasm is our greatest challenge.” - Booklist

“Vivid and evocative, these stories will appeal to readers of both popular and literary fiction.” - Library Journal

“[Laken] can turn out finely wrought observations on people’s miseries and bad choices like she grew up at Chekhov’s knee. But she brings some extra juice, both playful and serious, to these eight tales. . . . A national talent.” - Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

“A perfectly plausible and rational ghost story: sexy, sharp-eyed, and deeply haunted all at once. The past never goes away. It is still there, inside the walls of this wonderful book.” - Charles Baxter, author of The Feast of Love

“A disaster occurs, but the human bonds that link these appealing characters are frayed, not broken. . . . Laken handles the fraught subjects of class, race, and family bonds with equal candor and sensitivity in this powerful book.” - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“This is a pitch-perfect collection, searching and graceful, containing just the right mixture of intelligence and heart.... All of the characters in this book are missing something deeply important to them—children or pets, spells of time or pieces of their own bodies. In Laken’s skillful and compassionate hands, though, they are never less than whole.” - Kevin Brockmeier, author of Things That Fall From the Sky and The Brief History of the Dead

“Valerie Laken proves herself again to be a writer of vast compassion, and dead-on accuracy, in these stories. SEPARATE KINGDOMS is a travel through the human psyche, but it is so rawly full of vivid places and pitch-perfect dialogue and sensory detail that you know you are in the visceral world of the characters as well as their minds. There are only eight stories here, but each one is so rich, so textured and nuanced, that I felt I’d dwelled among these familiar strangers in their kingdoms for a sumptuous period of years, and yet I started the collection again as soon as I had finished it, recalling things I felt an urgent need to read again. Valerie Laken takes aim at the human experience, and does not shoot. Instead, she steps forward, into places we wouldn’t dare, and lays them bare for the reader. This is life-changing work, the kind of reading one longs for and so rarely finds.” - Laura Kasischke, author of In a Perfect World

“Beyond the luminous prose, the shining intelligence (as opposed to mere cleverness) and narrative boldness, what I perhaps prize most in Valerie Laken’s work is an empathy that knows no boundaries. She conjures her disparate figures and settings with a clear-eyed authenticity that goes beyond mere detail, arrowing in on the emotional truth of a character or situation.” - Peter Ho Davies, author of The Welsh Girl