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Start giftingAdults and Other Children
This audiobook uses AI narration.
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Learn moreAdults and Other Children follows four women as they navigate life from the confusion and innocence of childhood to the bizarre and darkly humorous complexities of adulthood.
Along the way, we meet a vindictive, and imaginary, nanny, who casts doubts about the true identity of a little girl’s new baby sister; a group of friends who spend their time obsessing over the gory details of a spate of recent crimes; a college professor who has her boss fired over an imagined sexual assault; and a Jewish woman who feigns ignorance in her religion, hoping to endear herself to an Orthodox widower.
Time and again, the girls and women in this riveting debut collection fantasize and deceive to get what they want―or what they think they want―while we find ourselves drawn to their often surprising and all too human behavior.
Adults and Other Children is Miriam Cohen’s debut collection. Her stories have appeared in the Black Warrior Review, StoryQuarterly, West Branch Wired, Cream City Review, the Florida Review, DIAGRAM, The Collagist, Cimarron Review, Carve, the Bennington Review, Fugue, Hobart, Image, Witness, Electric Lit, and Third Coast. The recipient of a Carol Houck Smith Fiction fellowship at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, she received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College.
Jane Oppenheimer is an experienced narrator, voiceover artist, and actress with a bachelor's degree in theater from Carnegie Mellon University. She has narrated numerous audiobooks and has performed on stage in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Her voiceover work can be heard on commercials as well as corporate campaigns and short documentaries.
Reviews
“An acute portrayal of failed relationships and struggles to transcend social norms.”
“Lies, misconceptions, and self-deception are at the heart of Miriam Cohen’s funny, scathing, and touching collection…When the heroines aren’t coping with loser boyfriends and lecherous bosses, they’re dealing with the fallout from their own messed-up families, wherein the adults are just as clueless as the kids.”
“Cohen’s fourteen stories offer an intimate examination of the complexities of her characters’ lives, particularly their struggles between compassion and obligation.”
“While the girls and women who inhabit Cohen’s fourteen stories share tangential relationships, what most binds this collection together is a sense of overpowering dread…A chilling view of womanhood—made up of lies, secrets, and fear—expressed in elegant prose.”
“These shockingly insightful stories, riddled with breathtaking observation, are also, frequently, laugh out loud funny. Wisdom and hilarity are such a gorgeous couple, and Miriam Cohen makes the absolute most of this pairing. Evocative of Lorrie Moore at her sharpest best, Cohen’s is still an entirely new and very welcome voice.”
“In the weird and gorgeous tradition of Angela Carter and Kelly Link, Miriam Cohen has written a manifesto of postmodern womanhood. Her characters are hilariously neurotic, exquisitely self-diminishing, and yet grotesquely eloquent―perverse poets all, wandering the streets of New York or suffocating in the decorated living rooms of suburbia, trying their dire best to navigate life’s labyrinths.”
"Adults & Other Children reimagines the Bildungsroman, as childhood clashes with adulthood to create a beautiful and terrifying emotional story. By stretching the misconceptions of children so thin and so wide, Miriam Cohen creates a glittering, transparent fabric through which we can finally read more clearly the myths that invent us.”
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