Betty
ISBN: 979-8-9877197-3-2
Binding: Trade paper
Publication date: October 15, 2024
The first title forthcoming from our imprint Betty, books by women for everyone.
Morally complex and often wryly funny, Take Me With You Next Time showcases the unpredictable ways smart, resilient women persevere to transcend troublesome events and difficult emotions.
This debut collection from award-winning short story author Janis Hubschman runs the gamut of emotion with characters who confront crises of infidelity, addiction, death, and dementia. Stories feature women held captive by misguided desire, heartbreak, and bewildering grief. They search for answers from psychics, hypnotists, old lovers, Charles Darwin, and the stars—until, at last, they discover they already possess the courage and insight they seek. With impeccable sentences and unerring, exquisite details, Hubschman’s fearless, lucid writing unlocks the worlds of her characters to reveal the human needs and longings we recognize as our own.
Advanced praise
“The women in Janis Hubschman’s funny, whip-smart stories have seen some things: they’ve raised children, had jobs come and go, said goodbye to parents and pets and houses. They’ve watched their husbands change—or not—from the men they married, and felt themselves change—or not—from who they once planned on being. With killer lines and keen observations, these sharp, moving stories speak to anyone who’s ever had to reckon with the decisions that brought them this far, and tried to figure out what lies ahead.”
—Caitlin Horrocks, author of Life Among the Terranauts
“In these vivid, stirring, and often laugh-out-loud funny stories, you will meet women who might feel familiar—like an old friend, a teacher, an aunt—until Hubschman’s descriptive powers and diamond-cut scenes render them new again and again, to the reader as well as to themselves. Read Take Me With You Next Time for its insights on female friendship, marriage, generational caretaking, and the unavoidable complications of these entanglements; then let your heart be shifted, as mine was, by the shimmer of hope that Hubschman manages to reveal within them.”
—Kate Milliken, author of Kept Animals
“The women in the twelve stories that make up Janis Hubschman’s Take Me With You Next Time are decades apart in age, yet they all want the same thing: to be truly seen—by their husbands and lovers, children, the world. Hubschman sees them, and she shows them to us—their faults and failures, successes and hopes—all presented with dark humor and deep compassion and startling moments of surprise. Take Me With You Next Time will leave you wanting to be taken along on all of this masterful storyteller’s next times.”
—Lori Ostlund, author of After the Parade & The Bigness of the World
Take Me With You Next Time by Janis Hubschman
Janis Hubschman has published over two dozen short stories in literary magazines that include Cimarron Review, Chautauqua Journal, Southern Humanities Review, Colorado Review, and Green Mountains Review among others. Her stories have won Bellingham Review’s Tobias Wolff Award and a first-place award from Glimmer Train. She has published essays in the New York Times, Glimmer Train Bulletin, and New York Runner. She was the recipient of a Bread Loaf-Rona Jaffe Fiction Scholarship and a fellowship from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She lives with her husband in New Jersey where she was born and raised and where many of her stories take place. She currently teaches fiction writing at Montclair State University. Take Me With You Next Time is her first book.
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