LAUREN COBB reads from BOULEVARD WOMEN

Boulevard Women (BkMk Press Books)

Boulevard Women is a collection of braided short stories about the lives of several women, including a teenager, a forty-something widow, and a seventy-something traditionally Southern-minded lady, who are neighbors on Boulevard, a historic avenue in Athens, Georgia, that has seen better times. As the characters discover what growing up—and growing old—entails for contemporary American women, their lives reveal the complicated relationships between race, gender, and religion in our modern-day lives.

Praise for Boulevard Women

The acclaimed writer Kelly Cherry, who selected the book for the 2012 G. S. Sharat Chandra Prize for Short Fiction, writes, ''With this debut collection Lauren Cobb proves herself as a writer who can create suspense, humor, and aesthetic shapeliness out of ordinary materials.” 

The critically lauded writer Judith Ortiz Cofer adds, “Boulevard Women is a compassionate and passionate rendering of the lives of the invisible women of a neighborhood in Athens, Georgia, that has seen better times. ... In a remarkably cohesive weave of interlocking stories, Lauren Cobb gives us a compelling look at our own lives.”

According to Susan Rebecca White, author of A Place at the Table, “Lauren Cobb’s Boulevard Women deftly explores the inner lives of women the world has largely overlooked. As the foundations of their lives shift and sometimes crumble, Cobb allows her characters to grow and change rather than to be knocked down. Cobb’s warm and wise heart guides them, and us, to a renewed sense of home.”

David Masiel, author of The Western Limit of the World, writes, “I loved this book. I couldn’t put it down until I’d finished, and I couldn’t get it out of my mind even then.” 

Award-winning novelist Sheri Joseph says, “Boulevard Women is a mesmerizing collection of linked short stories, with characters so real, so familiar, that they lingered in my thoughts long after I closed the book. Set against the backdrop of race and religion in the contemporary South, this literary debut reveals an impressive stylistic ranger, from wry social comedy reminiscent of Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge to the poetic lyricism of To Kill a Mockingbird. ... an entrancing world that I didn’t want to leave.”

And Lorraine Lopez, author of Homicide Survivors Picnic and Other Stories, adds, “Lauren Cobb’s unforgettable characters grow and change, unfolding and expanding to reveal unexpected dimensions and complexity, great depth and wit, in ways that will astonish and delight.”

Lauren Cobb’s short fiction has appeared in numerous literary journals, including the Beloit Fiction Review, Green Mountains Review, Arts & Letters and the Robert Olen Butler Prize Stories for 2007. Her awards include Another Chicago Magazine’s Chicago Literary Award and second place in the Second Annual Southern California Review Fiction Award. Her collection of linked short stories, titled Boulevard Women, received the 2012 G. S. Sharat Chandra Prize for Fiction and was published by the University of Missouri-Kansas City’s BkMK Press in December 2013. Originally from Los Angeles, Lauren Cobb now lives in northern Minnesota, where she is a professor of English at Bemidji State University. She is currently working on a literary murder mystery.