UMass Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press

Book Jacket: "The Daiquiri Girls" by T. Graham

Toni Graham

Winner of the AWP Award for Short Fiction

A striking collection of stories about four San Francisco women and their relationships with men

The stories in this debut collection deliver the reader into a darkly comic world where women—whether married, divorced, or single—lead complex urban lives. Jane, Magda, Zoe, and Victoria have all had their bouts with loneliness. They toy with alcohol and drugs, are haunted by memories, and yet their lives are also marked by episodes of joy, whimsy, and the surprise of crazy encounters. They confront life head-on, refusing to cave in.

In "Rapture" Magda flies to Las Vegas for a workshop on film journalism, shares a Honeymoon Suite with an old friend, and meets a man in a bar who makes her wonder if she's come to the desert to find God. In "Skin and Bone" Zoe has her face peeled shortly after her husband leaves her, and then begins a manic streak of sideswiping parked cars. In "Faithful" she realizes that all her perceptions are in doubt, that she can no longer tell love from lust, faith from faithlessness. In "Tooth and Nail" Victoria is introduced to her lover's Jewish family and soon discovers that while they warmly invite Asians into the fold, they turn a cold shoulder to WASPs. In "My Higher Power" she prays for love but ends up in bed with her dog.

In these stories, we find that women's attempts at self-anesthetization ironically result in highly conscious states of being. While focusing on life's bleaker moments, these women are distracted by its quirky sensory details and sometimes unearth a newer, braver sexuality within themselves.

"A deeply personal, deeply sensual account of women's lives, The Daiquiri Girls explores four women whose stories revolve around circumstances of desire and betrayal. The stories are so powerfully rendered and obsessively focused that a fifth character emerges, the woman whose story encompasses the others. The cumulative effect is astonishing. Toni Graham's stories are dark, bitingly funny, and relentlessly passionate. The prose is nothing short of beautiful."

Robert Boswell

A native of San Francisco, Toni Graham has taught creative writing at a number of Bay Area colleges, including the University of San Francisco and the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Fiction
208 pp.
LC 98-35813
$32.50t cloth, ISBN 1-55849-167-8
1998

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