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Once Removed: Stories
The women in the linked short story collection Once Removed carry the burdens imposed in the name of intimacy―the secrets kept, the lies told, the disputes initiated―as well as the joy that can still manage to triumph. A singer with a damaged voice and an assumed identity befriends a silent, troubled child; an infertile law professor covets a tenant’s daughterly affection; a new mother tries to shield her infant from her estranged mother’s surprise Easter visit; an aging shopkeeper hides her husband’s decline and a decades-old lie to keep her best friends from moving away.
With depth and an acute sense of the fragility of intimate connection, Colette Sartor creates stories of women that resonate with emotional complexity. Some of these women possess the fierce natures and long, vengeful memories of expert grudge holders. Others avoid conflict at every turn, or so they tell themselves. For all of them, grief lies at the core of love.
With depth and an acute sense of the fragility of intimate connection, Colette Sartor creates stories of women that resonate with emotional complexity. Some of these women possess the fierce natures and long, vengeful memories of expert grudge holders. Others avoid conflict at every turn, or so they tell themselves. For all of them, grief lies at the core of love.
- GenresShort Stories
216 pages, Paperback
Published September 15, 2019
About the author
Colette Sartor
1 book15 followersColette Sartor grew up a nice, New Jersey Italian girl looking to escape the trajectory expected from nice, New Jersey Italian girls: marriage, three-kid minimum, Sunday mass followed by a sit-down dinner for the entire extended family that she alone would cook, serve, and clean up. After fleeing to Los Angeles to be an entertainment lawyer, she found herself disappointed by the Southern California beaches (not nearly as pretty as the Jersey shore) and by lawyering (which sucked), so she quit her job after a few years (okay, eight) and started writing fiction.
Colette’s linked short story collection Once Removed (University of Georgia Press) won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the NYC Big Book Award for Short Story Collections, the IAN Best Book of the Year Award for Outstanding Short Story Collection, the National Indie Excellence Juror’s Choice Award, and the National Indie Excellence Award for Short Story Collection.
Her work has appeared in The Chicago Tribune,Kenyon Review Online, Slice Magazine, Carve Magazine, The Rumpus, Hello Giggles, Prairie Schooner, Colorado Review, Harvard Review, and elsewhere. Among other places, her work has been anthologized in Short Stories from Printers Row, The Press 53 Open Awards Anthology, and Law and Disorder: Stories of Conflict and Crime. Her other awards include a Writers@Work Fiction Prize, a Fugue Prose Award, a Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award, a Reynolds Price Short Fiction Award, a Press 53 Open Award, and a Truman Capote fellowship from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she completed her MFA. She also is an alumna of the Community of Writers, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Ragdale Foundation Residency, and Tin House Summer Workshops.
Colette has taught writing for almost 20 years and currently teaches at UCLA Extension Writers’ Program and Los Angeles Writers’ House as well as privately. As a freelance editor, she has edited numerous fiction and nonfiction projects, including a creative writing textbook, and she served as senior fiction editor for the prize-winning Pif Magazine.
She also cohosts the Literary Roadhouse Bookclub podcast. In addition, she is the Executive Director of The CineStory Foundation, a nonprofit mentoring organization for emerging TV writers and screenwriters. She still lives in Los Angeles with her husband, son, and very large German Shepherd Dog who has yet to outgrow his destructo-boy instincts, and she never wants to practice law again.
Colette’s linked short story collection Once Removed (University of Georgia Press) won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the NYC Big Book Award for Short Story Collections, the IAN Best Book of the Year Award for Outstanding Short Story Collection, the National Indie Excellence Juror’s Choice Award, and the National Indie Excellence Award for Short Story Collection.
Her work has appeared in The Chicago Tribune,Kenyon Review Online, Slice Magazine, Carve Magazine, The Rumpus, Hello Giggles, Prairie Schooner, Colorado Review, Harvard Review, and elsewhere. Among other places, her work has been anthologized in Short Stories from Printers Row, The Press 53 Open Awards Anthology, and Law and Disorder: Stories of Conflict and Crime. Her other awards include a Writers@Work Fiction Prize, a Fugue Prose Award, a Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award, a Reynolds Price Short Fiction Award, a Press 53 Open Award, and a Truman Capote fellowship from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she completed her MFA. She also is an alumna of the Community of Writers, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Ragdale Foundation Residency, and Tin House Summer Workshops.
Colette has taught writing for almost 20 years and currently teaches at UCLA Extension Writers’ Program and Los Angeles Writers’ House as well as privately. As a freelance editor, she has edited numerous fiction and nonfiction projects, including a creative writing textbook, and she served as senior fiction editor for the prize-winning Pif Magazine.
She also cohosts the Literary Roadhouse Bookclub podcast. In addition, she is the Executive Director of The CineStory Foundation, a nonprofit mentoring organization for emerging TV writers and screenwriters. She still lives in Los Angeles with her husband, son, and very large German Shepherd Dog who has yet to outgrow his destructo-boy instincts, and she never wants to practice law again.
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Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews
December 24, 2022
A well-orchestrated literary collection of vibrant human stories that left me breathless!
August 20, 2019
via my blog: https://bookstalkerblog.wordpress.com/
'But it was exhilarating to be fearful, to feel something other than an endless cycle of impatience, hope, grief, rage.'
Once Removed is a collection filled with moments in our lives that threaten to spill over, overwhelmed with quiet suffering, desperate need to clutch at what is falling away. Sometimes the ugly, means things we think get exposed here, but full of raw honesty. In Bandit, Hannah finds it easier to form an intimacy with a young boarder named Rune than face the desperate hope and need on her husband’s face after a stunning loss. Sometimes it’s easier to reach for strangers when what needs to be faced is a pain like swallowing glass, our shared tragedies pushing us apart. How do we just ‘move on’, there is no timeline to healing.
In Daredevil, Grace is a sad mother trying to build a new life coming out of the storm of a broken home, fractured family. Her yearning to bond with her son, wounded and fragile is upended all the more by a sickly little girl named Noreen, whom she teaches along with her son in Sunday school. “Forgive me, Grace prayed sometimes after receiving Communion, forgive me for being thankful she’s not mine.” All Grace wants is to lift she and her son out of this pit, this pain of ‘a family in ruins’, a shame she can’t repair the landscape of her own home but she tries, lord knows she tries. Why is her eight year old son always trying to get away from her? Why is he accepting dares, doing things that are always to his own detriment, turning away from her boundless love for him? Why can’t she protect him?
These are families with insurmountable distances between them, favorites who have jumped ship and left the least admired child behind to keep parents afloat, as in Jump. The pain of comparison that is born within families, the terror of one day creating your own family, always armed to defend oneself because no one else ever has your back. Could you, dare you attempt motherhood? Carrying the dead-horse of your own childhood, fearful you just don’t have it in you to be any good at parenting. Marney juggles the viciousness of jealousy, betrayal and need for her family to be intact, but her needs are never considered. How do you chose one over another, seems her mother certainly always chose her brother Winston first. Winston who has gone away, who holds his grudge tight. Marney’s love life isn’t any easier, as she butts heads with her boyfriend’s mother, relationships feel like a continuation of one’s own family saga. How is it some escape the madhouse and others are entrapped by it?
The stories are connected and when I got to Once Removed, it was a gut punch. How did we get here, something I think a lot of us ask about the awful moments we encounter in our lives? We try to be better people than we are, wedging ourselves into stories that were playing out before we stepped in, because everyone is anchored somewhere we are an uninvited, unwelcome guest. The push of wanting to heal what life breaks, the ache and sacrifice of parenting, the strange little families we must make in lieu of tragedy. Once Removed was a lump in my throat, being afraid when challenged, longing for things that seem forever outside the boundaries of your current reality, the cruelty of fate. Too, the silence we hold just to keep our family intact, the unsaid always a bigger fissure than what we explain.
What a collection! Families, how do we survive them? How do we survive without them? Hope that feels like disease, hope demands so much of us. Mothers and daughters, the push and pull of resentment and love, loyalties and how we divide them, the ache of it. Colette Sartor is an author to watch, she writes beautifully about the intricacies of relationships, imperfect situations and everything that follows the impact of tragedies. Yes, read this collection.
Publication Date: September 15, 2019
University of Georgia Press
'But it was exhilarating to be fearful, to feel something other than an endless cycle of impatience, hope, grief, rage.'
Once Removed is a collection filled with moments in our lives that threaten to spill over, overwhelmed with quiet suffering, desperate need to clutch at what is falling away. Sometimes the ugly, means things we think get exposed here, but full of raw honesty. In Bandit, Hannah finds it easier to form an intimacy with a young boarder named Rune than face the desperate hope and need on her husband’s face after a stunning loss. Sometimes it’s easier to reach for strangers when what needs to be faced is a pain like swallowing glass, our shared tragedies pushing us apart. How do we just ‘move on’, there is no timeline to healing.
In Daredevil, Grace is a sad mother trying to build a new life coming out of the storm of a broken home, fractured family. Her yearning to bond with her son, wounded and fragile is upended all the more by a sickly little girl named Noreen, whom she teaches along with her son in Sunday school. “Forgive me, Grace prayed sometimes after receiving Communion, forgive me for being thankful she’s not mine.” All Grace wants is to lift she and her son out of this pit, this pain of ‘a family in ruins’, a shame she can’t repair the landscape of her own home but she tries, lord knows she tries. Why is her eight year old son always trying to get away from her? Why is he accepting dares, doing things that are always to his own detriment, turning away from her boundless love for him? Why can’t she protect him?
These are families with insurmountable distances between them, favorites who have jumped ship and left the least admired child behind to keep parents afloat, as in Jump. The pain of comparison that is born within families, the terror of one day creating your own family, always armed to defend oneself because no one else ever has your back. Could you, dare you attempt motherhood? Carrying the dead-horse of your own childhood, fearful you just don’t have it in you to be any good at parenting. Marney juggles the viciousness of jealousy, betrayal and need for her family to be intact, but her needs are never considered. How do you chose one over another, seems her mother certainly always chose her brother Winston first. Winston who has gone away, who holds his grudge tight. Marney’s love life isn’t any easier, as she butts heads with her boyfriend’s mother, relationships feel like a continuation of one’s own family saga. How is it some escape the madhouse and others are entrapped by it?
The stories are connected and when I got to Once Removed, it was a gut punch. How did we get here, something I think a lot of us ask about the awful moments we encounter in our lives? We try to be better people than we are, wedging ourselves into stories that were playing out before we stepped in, because everyone is anchored somewhere we are an uninvited, unwelcome guest. The push of wanting to heal what life breaks, the ache and sacrifice of parenting, the strange little families we must make in lieu of tragedy. Once Removed was a lump in my throat, being afraid when challenged, longing for things that seem forever outside the boundaries of your current reality, the cruelty of fate. Too, the silence we hold just to keep our family intact, the unsaid always a bigger fissure than what we explain.
What a collection! Families, how do we survive them? How do we survive without them? Hope that feels like disease, hope demands so much of us. Mothers and daughters, the push and pull of resentment and love, loyalties and how we divide them, the ache of it. Colette Sartor is an author to watch, she writes beautifully about the intricacies of relationships, imperfect situations and everything that follows the impact of tragedies. Yes, read this collection.
Publication Date: September 15, 2019
University of Georgia Press
December 22, 2019
This haunting collection has stayed with me far longer than most books I’ve read. Each character’s journey twists and turns in ways that remind us what it is to be human, fallible, imperfect and yet, at our core, lovable and vulnerable. The characters search for love, connection and joy, sometimes finding it, sometimes not, and we are reminded that, no matter how fleeting happiness may be, it is always worth the journey. The stories are also loosely interconnected and I loved the way characters from stories I’d already read reappeared unexpectedly in others and impacted the new characters. I cared as much for the new characters as the characters I’d already met. I’m eager to read more from this author.
April 4, 2020
Stunning collection of interlinked stories featuring strong, yet vulnerable women, exploring fears, desires, earned raw emotion, and so much more
I am literally swooning over this collection of interlinked stories by Colette Sartor. ONCE REMOVED: Stories (University of Georgia Press, September 2019) and winner of the Flannery O'Conner Award for Short Fiction, shimmers with radiant, but unsettling characters in authentic situations. It's mostly about intimacy--and I'm not talking about sex here--it's the voids and turns of life brimming with emotional complexity. It's about babies and meals, traditions, and customs. It's about houses and homes; leaving and going; about love and grief, fierce natures and grudge-holders. It's about disillusionment and estrangement.
The prose is pounding with pulse, and yet, there's a lyrical restraint here, too. Sartor strips away the facade we fallible humans hide behind, revealing the (sometimes) crumbling foundation. She excavates the fears, desires, secrets in ways that are surprising and while troublesome, are also delightful. The emotion here is raw, but it's earned. She does a fabulous job of 'set-up,' planting little seeds for the reader, and when the conclusion comes, it's both inevitable and surprising.
Each of these stories-and I'm not really going into specifics because you just need to read them--are organically told, they unfurl in a way that feels like interlocking pieces of a puzzle. I had several ah-ha! moments as I read, discovering connections between various characters. This is truly a 'linked' collection, not just a smattering of work by the same author; they are tethered together in a satisfying whole that works on both a micro- and macro-level , no easy feat.
Overall, I loved ONCE REMOVED. Do yourself a favor and dive in.
I found some connections between this collection and others of similar ilk, including: IF THE ICE HAD HELD (Wendy J. Fox), THAT TIME I LOVED YOU (Carrianne Leung), THE WONDER GARDEN (Lauren Acampora), maybe also the writing style of Anita Shreve meets Thomas Christopher Greene.
For all my reviews, including author interviews, please see: www.leslielindsay.com|Always with a Book.
Special thanks to the author and The University of Georgia Press for this review copy. All thoughts are my own.
I am literally swooning over this collection of interlinked stories by Colette Sartor. ONCE REMOVED: Stories (University of Georgia Press, September 2019) and winner of the Flannery O'Conner Award for Short Fiction, shimmers with radiant, but unsettling characters in authentic situations. It's mostly about intimacy--and I'm not talking about sex here--it's the voids and turns of life brimming with emotional complexity. It's about babies and meals, traditions, and customs. It's about houses and homes; leaving and going; about love and grief, fierce natures and grudge-holders. It's about disillusionment and estrangement.
The prose is pounding with pulse, and yet, there's a lyrical restraint here, too. Sartor strips away the facade we fallible humans hide behind, revealing the (sometimes) crumbling foundation. She excavates the fears, desires, secrets in ways that are surprising and while troublesome, are also delightful. The emotion here is raw, but it's earned. She does a fabulous job of 'set-up,' planting little seeds for the reader, and when the conclusion comes, it's both inevitable and surprising.
Each of these stories-and I'm not really going into specifics because you just need to read them--are organically told, they unfurl in a way that feels like interlocking pieces of a puzzle. I had several ah-ha! moments as I read, discovering connections between various characters. This is truly a 'linked' collection, not just a smattering of work by the same author; they are tethered together in a satisfying whole that works on both a micro- and macro-level , no easy feat.
Overall, I loved ONCE REMOVED. Do yourself a favor and dive in.
I found some connections between this collection and others of similar ilk, including: IF THE ICE HAD HELD (Wendy J. Fox), THAT TIME I LOVED YOU (Carrianne Leung), THE WONDER GARDEN (Lauren Acampora), maybe also the writing style of Anita Shreve meets Thomas Christopher Greene.
For all my reviews, including author interviews, please see: www.leslielindsay.com|Always with a Book.
Special thanks to the author and The University of Georgia Press for this review copy. All thoughts are my own.
December 23, 2019
The stories in Once Removed remind me of Mavis Gallant's brilliant fiction, only Sartor's tales resonate with the angst and moxie of our current generation of women. The book is like a finely tuned puzzle with interlocking pieces that keep shifting as central characters in one story turn up as background figures in another set years later. Sartor plays wonderful games with time and age, jumping back and forth decades as we meet characters in infancy only to bump into them later as sulky teenagers, or as elderly wives whose identities remain intertwined with their brazen girlhoods. The characters in this collection are tough, hurt, determined, and yearning. They rise up from the page and share their confidences like true friends. This is a dazzling debut.
November 16, 2019
This linked collection of short stories is one of the most memorable debuts in recent memory. Each story, each scene, each line is sculpted with power and purpose. Can't wait to read more from this author.
December 22, 2019
What a collection! Moving, surprising, with rich threads of connection between the stories that deepen with each turn of the page. Colette Sartor is a force. Lovers of Alice Munro and Grace Paley’s characters will find “Once Removed” to be a similarly powerful read. One of my faves of 2019!
November 15, 2019
Beautifully written stories that reveal layers in her characters that lie below the surface. Each story is compelling and unique, but my personal favorite is her closer: La Cuesta Encantada, a lovely story that reminds me of the best of Alice Munro.
November 12, 2019
I could not stop reading these stories. Am now on the last one and don't want it to end. They are beautifully written and so evocative. The plots and characters are creatively interwoven in a deft way that reminds me of Elizabeth Strout (Olive Kitteridge). Dangerous to read on public transportation because they are so absorbing that you are likely to miss your stop.
December 9, 2019
Not usually a reader of short stories, but I so enjoyed this collection - pleasantly surprised and satisfied by the link between stories that helped flesh out some of the central characters in the collection. The beautifully, sensitively-drawn relationships - particularly between mothers and daughters - made these stories particularly poignant.
November 2, 2019
This is a collection of beautifully written linked stories about women and their relationships with their spouses, their children, and the world. I feel like I know these women - their vulnerabilities, their weaknesses. Because the characters reoccur in other stories - certain characters always being in the background or other moving from minor character to main character - we get to see new revelations about these characters. Just wonderful.
November 20, 2020
I found myself carrying this gorgeous collection of linked short stories everywhere I went; I was hooked! I was delighted to see some of the characters crop up again in other stories in the collection. The quality of the storytelling is stellar, deftly carrying us into these women’s lives and dreams, as they navigate a wide ranging set of circumstances. I became interested in the inspiration for this work and found out that Rose Corsica, a compelling figure, who appears in several of the stories (“Lamb,” “Jump,” and “Malocchio”) is based on the author’s paternal grandmother. As a reader, we are treated to an intimate and close-up close up look at families, the complexity of each individual within the relationship, and how they experience grief, desire, and the fleeting nature of all that is held dear in life. The potential for loss, whether a child, a relationship, a voice or something else, never feels too far away and the telling of these stories feels true, as if I might have known some of these women or have shared some piece of their experience in my own life. I felt the presence of these different personalities and their individual journeys long after I finished the book.
September 16, 2019
The stories in Once Removed by Colette Sartor, have been weighty yet engaging. Practically all of the accounts in this collection dealt with family drama, the despair family members go through and who they turn to when circumstances get difficult. One story in particular hit close to home.
Sartor showed everyday people attempting to figure out life and the sacrifices one will make for family or not when they are troubled. It also dealt with parent and child matters, and the sacrifices parents make for their children.
I very much enjoyed reading this short story collection and look forward to reading more by Sartor. I think I might add a physical copy to my shelf for future rereads.
#netgalley #onceremovedstories
Sartor showed everyday people attempting to figure out life and the sacrifices one will make for family or not when they are troubled. It also dealt with parent and child matters, and the sacrifices parents make for their children.
I very much enjoyed reading this short story collection and look forward to reading more by Sartor. I think I might add a physical copy to my shelf for future rereads.
#netgalley #onceremovedstories
September 6, 2019
Thank you to University of Georgia Press and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.
This collection of stories sneaks up on you and pulls you in., quietly and steadily. The stories are connected, which gives an extra edge when your mind catches up and realizes that you are seeing things from a different angle than before. The author writes truly beautiful prose about heavy issues, sometimes filled with grief, sometimes with small joys. Families in all their permutations, relationships and their lack, coping with the difficulties that fate deals you - heavy, but written with such a light hand.
Highly recommended!
This collection of stories sneaks up on you and pulls you in., quietly and steadily. The stories are connected, which gives an extra edge when your mind catches up and realizes that you are seeing things from a different angle than before. The author writes truly beautiful prose about heavy issues, sometimes filled with grief, sometimes with small joys. Families in all their permutations, relationships and their lack, coping with the difficulties that fate deals you - heavy, but written with such a light hand.
Highly recommended!
February 25, 2020
Beneath the buttery surface of Colette Sartor’s prose, her female characters struggle mightily. They struggle with their roles in the world, their memories, and their anxieties about the future. Most often, they struggle with their maternal relationships, whether as mothers, would-be mothers, or as daughters. In the collection’s opening story, "Bandit," a woman downed by the loss of her stillborn twins takes in a suspicious boarder against her husband’s wishes. In "Daredevil," a woman newly separated from her husband battles to connect with her young son, who is being bullied by an ill girl. In "Extra Precautions," a pregnant woman who finds real and imagined dangers all around struggles to believe that she can keep her unborn child safe. In the collection’s title story, "Once Removed," a woman struggles to accept stepmotherhood of a disabled teenage boy, though she longs for romantic connection with the boy’s father. Indeed, driving all of these women’s struggles is a longing for basic human connection, and the reader feels it painfully when the characters fall short. In the brilliant "Lamb," a woman struggling with the exhaustion of new motherhood and the concomitant shift in her identity as she’s had to pull back from her professional life must confront the perennial hardness of her challenging mother, Rose, a well-wrought character who appears in several of the collection’s stories. "Malocchio," which depicts Rose as a child, gives the reader a glimpse into Rose’s early difficulty connecting with her own mother and also making friends. All of the stories in this award-winning collection stun with their fluid prose and palpable humanity. Absolutely worth reading!
June 29, 2020
For a first book, this was a powerful collection of short stories. The author weaves a series of interlocking vignettes that contain assorted characters experiencing complex human situations, emotional crises and internal turmoil. But there are also numerous notes of affection and love as well as grief. In addition to the well drawn characters and attractive prose, the author has a keen sense of pace and timing with some stories containing episodes that are contemporary and others retrospective. I found every story to be compelling and they stuck with me for quite a while afterwards. The author's writing style is lively but the stories are deep. I highly recommend this book and look forward to her next one.
May 9, 2020
The stories in this book are interwoven so well together. Each story stands alone in strength, character, plot, and narrative and yet fortified by the other stories that encircle it. Once Removed: Stories reminded me of Robert Altman's film Short Cuts minus the misogyny. Once Reomoved is written through the female gaze. Well crafted and engaging.
June 6, 2020
Once Removed's linked short stories capture moments in women's lives filled with texture and tension. Sartor deftly drops us into the lives of fully-rendered characters and asks us to hang out. We spend a few days with women seeking solutions within themselves and from the world. I haven't read a story collection that kept me this engaged in a very long time.
May 4, 2020
I liked all of these stories. I was initially thinking it would be a collection of short stories. However, as I got deeper into the book, all of the stories wound around each other. It jumps around a little, but that seems to be part of its charm.
October 16, 2022
This incredible collection of short stories blew me away. I can't remember the last time I read a collection that I savored as much as I did this one. Every line, every image, every detail ~ I didn't want Once Removed to end. Highly recommend. Colette Sartor is an author that will be heard from.
January 24, 2020
In my opinion, careful, calculated writing. No pulse.
July 3, 2020
Beautiful prose, compelling characters, and surprising plot twists animate this wonderful collection of short stories.
February 14, 2024
The first story in the collection rocked me. Some other stories weren’t as polished as that first one, but it was a well crafted collection as a whole.
Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews