The Beauty of Their Youth
Short Stories
by Joyce Hinnefeld
paperback, 108 pages
2020
These are stories of awakening, but not in the “rite of passage” sense so familiar to American fiction. Here we awaken from the dream of the life we’ve been living purposefully for a long time. The five stories of The Beauty of Their Youth give a pointed precision to an insight that haunts Joyce Hinnefeld’s fine novels, namely, that mistaken perceptions and misguided decisions, rather than tragic flaws that must destroy us, are inextricably part of the ordinary texture of our lives. Our flaws, not foreign or ultimately even “wrong,” are intimately at home among the characteristic peculiarities that define our humanity. This is a vision that understands without excusing, joining the past self to the future self, and one person to another, in a community in which we share responsibility for the stories that we tell.
About the Author
Joyce Hinnefeld's short story collection The Beauty of Their Youth is part of the Wolfson Press American Storytellers series. She is the author of two novels, In Hovering Flight and Stranger Here Below, and the short story collection Tell Me Everything and Other Stories (winner of the 1997 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Bakeless Prize in Fiction). She is a professor of English at Moravian College in Bethlehem, PA. Visit her homepage.
