Book cover for Show Don't Tell: Stories by Curtis Sittenfeld

Show Don't Tell

Stories

2025 Released
336 Pages
6-7 Hours
★ 4.02 129 ratings
Audiobook Unavailable
Random HouseISBN 9780593446744

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The bestselling author of Eligible and Romantic Comedy “blends acerbic wit, shrewd insight and sharp-eyed observation [in this] bravura collection” (The Washington Post), including a story that revisits the main character from her iconic novel Prep

“Each of these witty, intelligent stories is a slice of modern life.”—People

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice • A Denver Public Library Best Book Of the Year

In her second story collection, Sittenfeld shows why she’s as beloved for her short fiction as she is for her novels. In these dazzling stories, she conjures up characters so real that they seem like old friends, laying bare the moments when their long held beliefs are overturned.

In “The Patron Saints of Middle Age,” a woman visits two friends she hasn’t seen since her divorce. In “A for Alone,” a married artist embarks on a creative project intended to disprove the so-called Mike Pence Rule, which suggests that women and men can’t spend time alone together without lusting after each other. And in “Lost but Not Forgotten,” Sittenfeld gives readers of her novel Prep a window into the world of her beloved character Lee Fiora, decades later, when Lee attends an alumni reunion at her boarding school.

Hilarious, thought-provoking, and full of tenderness for her characters, Sittenfeld’s stories peel back layer after layer of our inner lives, keeping us riveted to the page with her utterly distinctive voice.

Curtis Sittenfeld

CURTIS SITTENFELD is the New York Times best-selling author of the novels Prep, The Man of My Dreams, American Wife, Sisterland, Eligible, and the forthcoming Rodham, which have been translated into thirty languages. She is also the author of the short story collection You Think It, I'll Say It and her short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, the Washington Post Magazine, Esquire, and The Best American Short Stories. Her nonfiction has been published inthe New York Times, The Atlantic, Time, and Glamour, and broadcast on public radio’s This American Life. A native of Cincinnati, she currently lives with her family in Minneapolis.

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