Days

"Robison is both wise and entertaining, a technician with a sense of humor, a minimalist with a good eye for what can be salvaged from lives of quiet desperation." —The New York Times Book Review



The population of Mary Robison's fiction is the stunned citizenry of a world vaporized beneath them, people who say "all right" and "okay" often, not because they consent, but because nothing counts. Still, there are chronicles of small victories here, small only because, as Robison so precisely documents, larger victories are impossible.



"There is an almost incredible purity of line and texture in these stories. Every phrase is lucid, every character comes alive, and every sentence suggested a calm, wise, heartbroken version of the world. Robison writes like an avenging angel, and I think she may be a genius." —Richard Yates, author of Cold Spring HarborPraise for Days

"There is an almost incredible purity of line and texture in these stories. Every phrase is lucid, every character comes alive, and every sentence suggests a calm, wise, heartbroken version of the world. Robison writes like an avenging angel, and I think she may be a genius." —Richard Yates, author of Cold Spring Harbor

"These are not stories so much as splinters of contemporary life, set under a microscope . . . there is humor here, as well as deadpan exactitude . . . Mary Robison's style at its best is stripped, incisive, clear as a piece of glass held up the the light." —Ann Tyler, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Breathing LessonsMary Robison was born in Washington, D.C. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two Pushcart Prizes, an O. Henry Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, and the 2018 Arts and Letters Award in Literature. She is the author of four novels and four story collections. She lives in Gainesville, Florida.