Jewelry Box

The Story Prize Blog's 'Outstanding 2013 Short Story Collections' "Micro-fictions, flash-memoirs, prose poems, incidents, anecdotes, extended metaphors-there's no differentiation on the book's part, nor is there much need, as most of the pieces are glittering little truths whether factual or not... In the end it's the images within the pieces--stories, memoirs, whatever you want to call them--that remain under your skin." -Inside Higher Ed "Rather than getting ensconced in the heavy drape of narrative, these short flares of memory allow the reader to enter Sheehan's memories as they are in her mind--a jumble of moments, people, objects, and sounds as they exist before analysis and ordering." -Publishers Weekly "Sheehan's histories focus on moments, on objects, on fragments. We, the readers, do the rest, carrying through our days Sheehan's embodiments of familiar things, letting our own minds and experiences fill in her ellipses." -Three Guys One Book "Not quite prose poems, not quite flash fiction, not quite memoir--nonetheless all of the above--the little pieces in Aurelie Sheehan's new collection that she calls 'histories' do, in fact, hint at her life history... Her entries--some as short as a single paragraph; none longer than a few pages--explore feminine sexuality, motherhood, daughterhood, and the writer's life related to feminine sexuality, motherhood, daughterhood." -Tucson Weekly "The book is written as if to disprove the fact that our trinkets are useless -- 58 stories that coalesce into a study of connection, a whole that becomes greater than the sum of its parts... Sometimes dream-like, autobiographical, or poetic, the book resists mere categorization in favor of assembling a vivid collection of instances imbued with nostalgia and import." - Brooklyn Rail "Many of the stories are relatable and go into private depths not often explored. Sometimes mundane things are fascinating, only because we don't generally dwell on them. And sometimes mundane things, taken out of context, become profound." -Trop "...the value is in each piece's ghostly history, where it has been, whose it was, what resonant deep emotions (pains, joys, fears, loves) are embedded in its tiny form. These histories can be quiet, and they can be loud. They can be momentous and they can be focused on almost overlookable interstices between such memorable moments ... There is an energy, a humor, and a raucous charge running through these stories, building beyond itself."-DIAGRAM "The jewelry box serves perfectly as a metaphor for a collection of histories composed of memories, objects, shards, 'all the hard, broken things' that we inevitably grow up and take possession of over a long period of time: a lifetime, no less, in which Sheehan and her multitude of narrators/voices reminds, we may never see 'the whole story.'" -New Letters