Missing Women and Others

On announcing June Spence as the winner of the 1995 Willa Cather Fiction contest, Leonard Michaels wrote, "these stories are not only rich in characters, events, and perceptions of the way we feel and think, they are also imaginatively written on every level, from the choice of particular words to the flow of sentences to the shape of whole stories. One sees great promise in this writer -- and then one thinks no, it isn't promise -- this writer has just plain entered the city".

Missing Women and Others is the first collection of stories by a young Southern writer whose dazzling -- and often startling -- use of language gives vivid and surprising life to a world we may think we know from reading the tabloids and keeping our eyes on our neighbors. Her characters are ordinary individuals, mostly women, whose lives go unnoticed by the world around them; and yet their longings and their appetites are larger than their unremarkable presence.

These are affecting tales of daughters, mothers, grandmothers; of wives, girlfriends, and lovers. Spence's stories capture the inner lives of misunderstood or marginalized characters -- the parts of ourselves we keep hidden within us. It is a rare and impressive introduction of a distinctive new voice in fiction.

Signed First Edition