A collection of stories exploring distance in all its forms: the emotional spaces that open up between family members, friends, and lovers; the gaps that emerge between who we were and who we are; the gulf between our private and public selves.
“Cities I’ve Never Lived In is not a compassionate book, exactly, despite all the sad things in it. From certain angles, it’s a kind of New England gothic, where the lost children and dead women and doppelgängers serve to add atmosphere and meaning to the narrator’s past peregrinations, her dalliances and uncertainties. It turns out in the end that this is in fact a book about an arty person with a complicated personal life. But it’s a lovely one, written in a moving and uncanny register.
All [these stories] provide spellbinding portraits of people in a state of flux or going nowhere fast, and they show Majka as a writer attuned to the depths and complexities of human emotion.
[These stories are] anchored in keenly observed specific details and pivot around deceptively imaginative plots. These are modest-seeming stories that hold deep truths, by a writer of great promise.
