The Winter Without Milk: Stories

Jane Avrich explores the perils of desire in these fifteen brilliant stories. Here are characters irresistibly attracted to excess — material, emotional, spiritual — who must in the end choose between a life of self-indulgence and a life of self-control. The results are both disastrous and uplifting, and often wickedly funny.
Throughout The Winter Without Milk are reimagined characters from literature and history — Oedipus, Lady Macbeth, Scheherezade, for example — as well as everyday people who want more. Avrich's writing ranges from whimsical to cerebral. She pays homage to everyone from Kafka to Keats to Sophocles but is very much an original and a major new talent in contemporary fiction. |

"Avrich's sentances are acute and piercing, giving these stories a striking delicacy and a confidence that is impossible to ignore." The New York Times Book Review

"Deftly written...[Avrich] balances skillfully between the fantastical and the real...keeps readers on the edge of their seats." The Washington Post

"Rich, wonderfully origianl writing...Highly descriptive, epigrammatic prose, literary allusions, and folkloric references offer complex, rewarding reading." Booklist, ALA

"Playful inventiveness and a fluid prose style...Stories astonish as much as they entertain." Kirkus Reviews, Starred

"Exceptional...Full of telling details, wickedly so...lives up to the promise of it's elegantly odd title...Distinctive." NPR - "Fresh Air"