Small Scale Sinners
Small Scale Sinners
$20.00
A scintillating debut story collection examining a fundamental question: What does it mean to be good?
In twelve kaleidoscopic stories, Mahreen Sohail shifts our perspective on this question from moment to moment. Two girls observe a group of child soldiers and one reflects: “My sister and I were only small scale sinners.” A chorus of sixth graders unravels a school year they spend obsessed with their twin classmates. A girl cuts off her beautiful long hair for her boyfriend’s dying mother, but he immediately wishes she hadn’t. Alternate, parallel lives are considered. With startling observations and economy of language, Sohail dives ever deeper into the question, asking how—in the midst of grief or betrayal, against a backdrop of war, or even just workaday suffering—being good matters. Small Scale Sinners announces the arrival of an extraordinary talent.
Mahreen Sohail
was born in Islamabad, Pakistan. She has an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, where she studied as a Fulbright Scholar, and was a Writing Fellow at A Public Space and a Charles Pick Fellow at the University of East Anglia. Her work has appeared in Granta, The Kenyon Review, Pushcart Prize XLII, and elsewhere. She lives in Washington, DC.
Praise
Sohail explores female desire and relationships in this electrifying debut story collection.
Publishers Weekly, starred review
Mahreen Sohail’s debut offers the same thrill as celebrated first collections by Jamel Brinkley and Colin Barrett and Yoon Choi: the pleasure of watching a singular sensibility awaken to its own expression. In these pages, a flawless eye for detail meets a daring instinct to tack and swerve and startle; stories rewrite themselves paragraph by paragraph and sometimes in the space of a single phrase, always following the pulse of life. Small Scale Sinners is wonderful on sisterhood, on sex, on Pakistan, on coming of age… It brought me to the “plasma level of happiness.”
Garth Risk Hallberg, editor of The Uncollected Stories of Mavis Gallant and author of City on Fire
Pure brilliance. I can't remember the last time I was so floored by a collection, these strange and wondrous narratives that revel in the sensation that, as one character puts it, “something wild is traveling in each of our bodies.” Sohail is funny and dark and absolutely in control, and she has written a masterful debut.
Kevin Wilson, author of Now Is Not the Time to Panic
Audacious and precise. Small Scale Sinners centers young women who act boldly, even as grief looms, testing liberation and its cost.
Jocelyn Nicole Johnson, author of My Monticello
Sohail writes like a pointillist paints, and her stories, while emotionally heavy, lift from the page with humor and piquant details.
Kirkus Reviews
