Show Don't Tell

Summary

Brought to you by Penguin.

A wry, razor-sharp and moving collection of stories exploring marriage and female friendship - including a story that revisits the main character from her iconic novel, Prep - from the New York Times bestselling author of Romantic Comedy and American Wife.

In ‘Lost But Not Forgotten,’ Sittenfeld gives readers of her novel Prep a chance to see how our beloved character Lee Fiora is doing twenty years later, when she returns for a school reunion and grapples with memories of an incident that happened while she was a student. In ‘Pretzels are for Biting,’ a woman looks up two best friends that she moved away from after her divorce. In ‘Creative Differences,’ a photographer from the mid-west quickly realizes that the ‘documentary’ she stars in is actually a commercial for a multi-national corporation. And in ‘Atomic Marriage,’ a Hollywood producer falls for a bestselling Christian self-help author while working on their film adaptation.

In these twelve dazzling stories, Sittenfeld skewers our assumptions about fame, marriage and prejudice. Laying bare on the page what we're all thinking but hesitate to say, she explores women's lives at the intersection of ambition, intimacy, and the entangled pursuit of a fulfilling life.

© Curtis Sittenfeld 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025