Squandering the Blue. Stories

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.