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Sign up todayAdmit This to No One
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Learn moreA collection of short stories laying bare the trappings of power in Washington, DC and the relationships caught in the middle
In Admit This to No One, we meet a group of women connected to a central figure either personally or professionally, and for better or for worse—an all-powerful and elusive Speaker of the House, whose political career has only stopped short of being Presidential due to his myriad extra-marital affairs. The Speaker’s daughters from his several failed marriages have a complicated relationship with him to say the least—alternating between longing for his affection or bristling with resentment, and occasionally relief at being left out of the spotlight.
His oldest daughter Lexie, from his “real family, the first one,” once his favorite who knew the real him, is now an adult who has blown up her career due to a sex scandal of her own. His long-time fixer and keeper of secrets, Mary-Grace, is relentless and uncompromising in her devotion to him, making the lives of the interns and aides under her purview in the Capitol miserable. When the Speaker’s life is in danger, the disparate women in his life will collide for the first time, but can their relationships be repaired?
These stories show us how Washington, DC’s true currency is power, but power is inextricable from oppression—DC is a city divided, not just by red or blue, right or left, but Black and white. Segregated by income and opportunity, but also physically by bridges and rivers, and police vehicles, Leslie Pietrzyk casts an unflinching and exacting gaze on her characters, as they grapple with the ways they have upheld white supremacy and misogyny. Shocking and profound, Pietrzyk writes with an emotional urgency about what happens when the bonds of family and duty are pushed to the limit, and how there is a path forward if individuals re-evaluate their own beliefs and actions.
Leslie Pietrzyk is the author of three novels, including Silver Girl, published by Unnamed Press in 2018. Her first collection of short stories, This Angel on My Chest, won the 2015 Drue Heinz Literature Prize and was published by University of Pittsburgh Press. Short fiction and essays have appeared in Ploughshares, Story magazine, Southern Review, the Gettysburg Review, Washingtonian, The Sun, the Washington Post Magazine, and others. Awards include a Pushcart Prize in 2020 and the 2020 Creative Arts Prize from the Polish American Historical Association. Organizations awarding fellowships include the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Hermitage Artist Retreat, Virginia Center for the Arts, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, the Hambidge Center, and Hawthornden International Retreat at Hawthornden Castle in Scotland.
Hillary Huber has recorded hundreds of titles spanning many genres. She is a multiple Audie Award Finalist, an Earphones Award winner, and an AudioFile Best Voice. Hillary has a BA in English Literature and is a voracious reader and listener of audiobooks. Hillary now splits her time between LA and NY.
Tim Campbell is an experienced audiobook narrator and actor who has recorded over 160 audiobooks from almost every genre. Equally comfortable reading as an American or a Brit, he has a background in history and philosophy as well as a versatility with accents and dialects. A classically trained singer, he performs regularly with the Los Angeles Master Chorale. He currently resides in Los Angeles, California.
Cassandra Campbell is a prolific audiobook narrator with more than 700 titles to date. Winner of four Audie Awards and nominated for a dozen more, she was a 2018 inductee in Audible’s inaugural Narrator Hall of Fame. She has consistently been an AudioFile Magazine Best Narrator as well as a Publisher’s Weekly Best Narrator of the Year. As an acting teacher, she spent five years as a faculty member of the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts and has performed in and directed dozens of plays at theaters across the country.
Chelsea Stephens is an experienced voice actor with a talent for mystery, sci-fi, and YA novels. She won an AudioFile Earphones Award for her narration of Pale Horse, Pale Rider by Katherine Anne Porter. She has a longtime love and appreciation for the performing arts, with experience in on-stage acting, singing, and voice-over. Her love for reading books and the pursuit of the story led her to narration. She enjoys unfolding characters and bringing listeners into new worlds.
Elizabeth Evans has received many grants and fellowships for her writing, including an NEA Fellowship, the James Michener Fellowship, and fellowships at Yaddo and MacDowell. She is the author of The Blue Hour and lives in Tucson, Arizona.
Bronson Pinchot, Audible’s Narrator of the Year for 2010, has won Publishers Weekly Listen-Up Awards, AudioFile Earphones Awards, Audible’s Book of the Year Award, and Audie Awards for several audiobooks, including Matterhorn, Wise Blood, Occupied City, and The Learners. A magna cum laude graduate of Yale, he is an Emmy- and People’s Choice-nominated veteran of movies, television, and Broadway and West End shows. His performance of Malvolio in Twelfth Night was named the highlight of the entire two-year Kennedy Center Shakespeare Festival by the Washington Post. He attended the acting programs at Shakespeare & Company and Circle-in-the-Square, logged in well over 200 episodes of television, starred or costarred in a bouquet of films, plays, musicals, and Shakespeare on Broadway and in London, and developed a passion for Greek revival architecture.
SUZIE ALTHENS records from her professional studio in Alaska, near the beautiful Matanuska Glacier. She narrates regularly for major publishers and specializes in audiobooks and e-learning. Suzie is enthusiastic about narrating nonfiction as it provides opportunities to share amazing memoirs, medical discoveries, and inspiration, but she also enjoys mysteries and women’s fiction. Suzie narrates children’s encyclopedias and donates time to narrate children’s fiction for Learning Ally, a nonprofit organization, when she has the opening to woo the reluctant young reader.
Reviews
“A collection of stories set in Washington, DC, full of scandal and insider details…An exciting read bristling with intelligence, political awareness, and psychological complexity.”
“Themes of power inequities, performative racial allyship, and sexual harassment wind through these brief but detailed sketches of America’s complicated and often unwritten rules of etiquette.”
“Pietrzyk dissects the messy interpersonal power dynamics of Washington, DC in this sharp debut collection of linked stories…Pietrzyk writes with insight and wit, and makes even tertiary characters feel fully developed. This ambitious work is pulled off with verve.”
“Pietrzyk provides an irresistible glimpse behind the curtain at the world of political DC, at those women whose misfortune it is to live in the shadow of a ‘great’ man. What is it like to be the unwanted daughter of a famous father—and is it better or worse to be his favorite? Pietrzyk is insightful and unyielding in the examination of these deeply flawed characters…Told with unsparing frankness in prose that cuts like a razor, these stories are as tough and as vulnerable as the lives they portray.”
“Leslie Pietrzyk takes a scalpel to white Washington, DC, and doesn’t flinch as she cuts it open. In these breathless (sometimes jaw-dropping) stories, Leslie dissects with precision, giving us every lonely, sad, and selfish thought from characters we’ve met at least once in the nation’s capital.”
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