Winner of The Flannery O'Connor Award, this critically acclaimed debut collection features ten stories set in the plains of the Midwest and the honky-tonks of the South. This is a world where happiness is half heartache, dreams dwindle, and infidelity becomes just another way to extend the family. Characters search in vain for "the one incident you can zero down to as the source of trouble, and everything bad that happens after if happens because of it." Witty and sly, exciting and powerful, these are stories about people who understand their own complicity belatedly, but never too late. Illuminated in these affecting, self-revealing stories is the measure of hope and healing that lies in every heart and coupling, no matter the trespass.

Source of Trouble

Literature & Fiction

Monroe, Debra

Contemporary

Touchstone

Wild, Cold State

A collection of short stories set in rural Wisconsin and about women seeking love in a land of cold winds and irresponsible men

United States

Simon&Schuster

In the lavishly acclaimed collection of short stories A Wild, Cold State, Flannery O'Connor Award - winning author Debra Monroe takes us into the lives of women striving for love and emotional fulfillment amidst a forbidding topography of glacial winds and stormY, unpredictable men. Set in rural Wisconsin, these interwoven tales run a gamut of moods and textures, ranging from the warmly nostalgic "The World's Great Love Novels, " in which the young narrator observes the extreme compromises adults make in the name of love, to the hard-edged and gritty "Crossroads Cafe, " in which a waitress searches for tenderness, though nothing in her life so far suggests that tenderness is available. Rendered in a spare and poetic style and marked by a nuanced grasp of relationships and the vagaries of desire, the stories in A Wild, Cold State offer a familiar and resonant portrayal of the complexities of everyday life and the fundamental human need for connection.

Explores the fractured life of Maide Bonasso, who, when she starts thinking about settling down in Tuscon, gets the opportunity to reconnect with her past and develops a surprising belief in the future as a result

Newfangled: A Novel

From award-winning writer Debra Monroe comes a funny and poignant story of a woman's quest to find a physical and emotional home. Maddie, a refugee from two marriages, wanders from place to place seeking new options and new connections. She eventually settles in a cozy old neighborhood in Tucson, gets a job, and contemplates her life so far: a mother who's been missing for two decades, a father she rarely sees, two sisters married to the same men for fifteen years, and a circle of quirky, spiteful, but loyal friends. Just as she's trying to decide whether she's actually "at home" in Tucson, she receives a phone call that sends her on another journey - one that takes her both physically and emotionally into the past and affords her a glimpse of a newfangled future.

Presents stories of love, marriage, sex, heartache, and unfulfilled dreams

Source of Trouble: Stories

Univ of Georgia Pr

A misfit in Spooner, Wisconsin, with its farms, bars, and strip joints, Debra Monroe leaves to earn a degree, then another, and another, and builds a career if only because her plans to be a midwestern housewife continually get scuttled. Fearless but naive, she vaults over class barriers but never quite leaves her past behind. When it comes to men, she s still blue collar. Negotiating the world of dating, Monroe pays careful attention to what love and sex mean to a woman ambivalent about her newfound status as liberated. Both the story of her steady rise into the professional class and a parallel history of unsuitable exes, this memoir reminds us how accidental even a good life can be. If Joan Didion advises us to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, Monroe takes this advice a step further and nods at the people she might have become but didn t. Funny, poignant, wise, My Unsentimental Education explores the confusion that ensues when a working-class girl ends up far from where she began.

My Unsentimental Education (Crux: The Georgia Series in Literary Nonfiction)

History

Americas

University of Georgia Press

After moving to a humble cottage outside of a tiny Texas town, Debra Monroe rids herself of an abusive husband, battles sexist contractors and workers as she renovates her home, and finally, after several disheartening letdowns, is able to adopt her beautiful baby daughter, Marie. Though elated that her dream is coming true, Monroe faces trials that befall her not just as a single mother but as a white mother of a black child. In On the Outskirts of Normal, two-time National Book Award nominee Monroe’s heart creaks “like china with hairline cracks” each time a racist comment rolls their way or stares linger a little too long in their direction. Though she and her daughter face serious undiagnosed illnesses leading to innumerable, painful doctor visits, Monroe remains steadfast in her dedication to Marie and their small but tight family. Reading On the Outskirts of Normal at times feels like driving through an unwieldy thunderstorm at night on the unlit country roads that snake their way to Monroe’s house in the woods; readers will feel her exhaustion but will be buoyed by her ever-present faith and fiery love. Pulitzer Prize winner Madeleine Blais writes that On the Outskirts of Normal is the “real deal: both a literary triumph and a triumph of the heart.”

On the Outskirts of Normal: Forging a Family Against the Grain (Crux: The Georgia Series in Literary Nonfiction)

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

A misfit in Spooner, Wisconsin, with its farms, bars, and strip joints, Debra Monroe leaves to earn a degree, then another, and another, and builds a career―if only because her plans to be a midwestern housewife continually get scuttled. Fearless but naive, she vaults over class barriers but never quite leaves her past behind. When it comes to men, she’s still bluecollar. Negotiating the world of dating, Monroe pays careful attention to what love and sex mean to a woman ambivalent about her newfound status as “liberated.”Both the story of her steady rise into the professional class and a parallel history of unsuitable exes, this memoir reminds us how accidental even a good life can be. If Joan Didion advises us “to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be,” Monroe takes this advice a step further and nods at the people she might have become but didn’t. Funny, poignant, wise, My Unsentimental Education explores the confusion that ensues when a working-class girl ends up far from where she began.

Parenting & Relationships

Parenting

Debra Monroe has always written about the source of trouble, "that one incident you zero down to and everything bad that happens afterward happens because of it." The illusion that every problem has a clear-cut cause and discernible solution is apparently her gateway drug. It Takes a Worried Woman explores the outer limits of her faith that all past hardship could have been prevented and all future hardship might still be. Yet one person's trouble is often a small eddy in the outflow of history, and this book becomes a meditation on the price of effort exerted against fixed circumstances. Dense with history, lyrical, at times darkly funny, these essays explore sexism, racism, hate speech, violence, Monroe's grief about dwindling access to the natural world, and her fears as her daughter's adult life unfolds. Whether depicting the ubiquitous pressure to marry, the search for a shape-shifting familiar old enough to be her mother, or childcare as a game of risk, Monroe takes a measured look at problems that could be solved, problems that may never be, and at all the ways that trouble is big but hope, new strategies, fresh patience, and endurance are eventually big enough.

It Takes a Worried Woman: Essays (Crux: The Georgia Series in Literary Nonfiction)

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Mental Health

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Monroe, Debra. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Monroe, Debra

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Monroe, Debra. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Source of Trouble

Wild, Cold State

Wild, Cold State

Newfangled: A Novel

Newfangled: A Novel

Source of Trouble: Stories

My Unsentimental Education (Crux: The Georgia Series in Literary Nonfiction)

On the Outskirts of Normal: Forging a Family Against the Grain (Crux: The Georgia Series in Literary Nonfiction)

My Unsentimental Education (Crux: The Georgia Series in Literary Nonfiction)

It Takes a Worried Woman: Essays (Crux: The Georgia Series in Literary Nonfiction)