Katherine Heiny. (2015). Single, Carefree, Mellow: Stories. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Katherine Heiny. 2015. Single, Carefree, Mellow: Stories. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Katherine Heiny, Single, Carefree, Mellow: Stories. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2015.

Katherine Heiny. Single, Carefree, Mellow: Stories. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2015.

OverDrive Product Record

images

• cover:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-100/0111-1/{C50992E9-5CDE-4236-825A-A954023D4AF6}Img100.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg
• thumbnail:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-200/0111-1/{C50992E9-5CDE-4236-825A-A954023D4AF6}Img200.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg
• cover150Wide:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-150/0111-1/C50/992/E9/{C50992E9-5CDE-4236-825A-A954023D4AF6}Img150.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg
• cover300Wide:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-400/0111-1/C50/992/E9/{C50992E9-5CDE-4236-825A-A954023D4AF6}Img400.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg

formats

1. • identifiers:
     1. • type: ISBN
        • value: 9780385353649
     2. • type: PublisherCatalogNumber
        • value: 240041
   • name: Adobe EPUB eBook
   • id: ebook-epub-adobe
2. • identifiers:
     1. • type: ASIN
        • value: B00MKZ6L5Q
     2. • type: PublisherCatalogNumber
        • value: 240041
   • name: Kindle Book
   • id: ebook-kindle
3. • identifiers:
     1. • type: ISBN
        • value: 9780385353649
     2. • type: PublisherCatalogNumber
        • value: 240041
   • name: OverDrive Read
   • id: ebook-overdrive

mediaType

eBook

primaryCreator

• role: Author
• name: Katherine Heiny

title

Single, Carefree, Mellow

dateAdded

2015-08-28T14:41:00-04:00

contentDetails

1. • href: https://link.overdrive.com/?websiteID=141&titleID=1903964
   • type: text/html
   • account:
     • name: Sacramento Public Library (CA)
     • id: 1151

sortTitle

Single Carefree Mellow Stories

crossRefId

1903964

subtitle

Stories

id

c50992e9-5cde-4236-825a-a954023d4af6

starRating

3.6

OverDrive MetaData

isPublicDomain

False

formats

1. • fileName: SingleCarefreeMellow_9780385353649_1903964
   • partCount: 0
   • fileSize: 2472306
   • identifiers:
     1. • type: ISBN
        • value: 9780385353649
     2. • type: PublisherCatalogNumber
        • value: 240041
   • rights:
     1. • type: Copying
        • value: 0
     2. • type: Printing
        • value: 0
     3. • type: Lending
        • value: 0
     4. • type: ReadAloud
        • value: 0
     5. • type: ExpirationRights
        • value: 0
   • name: Adobe EPUB eBook
   • isReadAlong: False
   • id: ebook-epub-adobe
   • onSaleDate: 2/3/2015
   • samples:
     1. • source: From the book
        • formatType: ebook-overdrive
        • url: https://samples.overdrive.com/single-carefree-mellow?.epub-sample.overdrive.com
2. • fileName: SingleCarefreeMellow_1903964
   • partCount: 0
   • fileSize: 0
   • identifiers:
     1. • type: PublisherCatalogNumber
        • value: 240041
     2. • type: ASIN
        • value: B00MKZ6L5Q
   • name: Kindle Book
   • isReadAlong: False
   • id: ebook-kindle
   • onSaleDate: 2/3/2015
   • samples:
     1. • source: From the book
        • formatType: ebook-overdrive
        • url: https://samples.overdrive.com/single-carefree-mellow?.epub-sample.overdrive.com
3. • fileName: SingleCarefreeMellow_9780385353649_1903964
   • partCount: 0
   • fileSize: 0
   • identifiers:
     1. • type: ISBN
        • value: 9780385353649
     2. • type: PublisherCatalogNumber
        • value: 240041
   • name: OverDrive Read
   • isReadAlong: False
   • id: ebook-overdrive
   • onSaleDate: 2/3/2015
   • samples:
     1. • source: From the book
        • formatType: ebook-overdrive
        • url: https://samples.overdrive.com/single-carefree-mellow?.epub-sample.overdrive.com

keywords

1. • value: family
2. • value: relationships
3. • value: literary fiction
4. • value: romance
5. • value: Humor
6. • value: holiday
7. • value: Fiction
8. • value: short story collections
9. • value: novels
10. • value: satire
11. • value: Comedy
12. • value: women
13. • value: Short Stories
14. • value: mystery
15. • value: Drama
16. • value: Women's Fiction
17. • value: Modern
18. • value: Contemporary Romance
19. • value: feminism
20. • value: Chick Lit
21. • value: literature
22. • value: fiction books
23. • value: funny books
24. • value: humor books
25. • value: humorous books
26. • value: satire fiction
27. • value: short stories collections
28. • value: short story anthology
29. • value: gifts for women
30. • value: gifts for her
31. • value: funny gifts
32. • value: realistic fiction books
33. • value: single carefree mellow
34. • value: women gifts
35. • value: long story short
36. • value: books fiction
37. • value: christmas office gifts

creators

1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Heiny, Katherine
   • bioText: Katherine Heiny's fiction has been published in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Narrative,Glimmer Train, and many other places. She lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband and children. This is her first book.
   • name: Katherine Heiny

imprint

Vintage

publishDate

2015-02-03T00:00:00-05:00

isOwnedByCollections

True

title

Single, Carefree, Mellow

fullDescription

For the commitment-averse women in these eleven sublime laugh-out-loud stories, falling in love is never easy and always inconvenient. 
“Single, Carefree, Mellow is a lot like the women who populate it: smart and sexy and a little bit ruthless.” —Entertainment Weekly
“Something like Cheever mixed with Ephron.” —The New York Times Book Review

Maya is in love with both her boyfriend and her boss. Sadie’s lover calls her as he drives to meet his wife at marriage counseling. Nina is more worried that the Presbyterian minister living above her garage will hear her kids swearing than that he will find out she’s sleeping with her running partner. 
The women grapple with love amidst everything from unwelcome houseguests to disastrous birthday parties as Katherine Heiny spins a debut that is superbly accomplished and endlessly entertaining.
 

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: Lena Dunham
   • content: "Katherine Heiny's work does something magical: elevates the mundane so that it has the stakes of a mystery novel, gives women's interior lives the gravity they so richly deserve -- and makes you laugh along the way."
2. • premium: False
   • source: Naomi Fry, The New York Times Book Review
   • content: "Heiny's wry, bittersweet debut . . . is something like Cheever mixed with Ephron: white, middle-class suburban discontent simmering below the surface, but treated with a light touch that keeps the focus squarely on the woman's point of view. . . . Heiny is very good at portraying the circumscribed landscapes, both literal and emotional, in which her characters live. She also gives credence to what is still a conundrum for many women: What role can I play in a world in which I am neither fully 'carefree' and 'mellow' when single, nor entirely 'giving' and 'content' when attached?"
3. • premium: False
   • source: People Magazine, Book of the Week
   • content: "Single, Carefree, Mellow['s] characters might have stepped out of Girls--grown-up but still groping toward happiness . . . These are wry, winning stories you won't forget soon."
4. • premium: False
   • source: Janet Maslin, The New York Times
   • content: "Sharply perceptive . . . Ms. Heiny [has] powers of writerly seduction . . . Cutely absurd enough to have the makings of a sitcom . . . The wit and character are given time to develop . . . Don't miss 'Blue Heron Bridge,' in which the obligatory affair is fraught with very funny snobbery on the part of Nina, a married woman involved with a younger man . . . Ms. Heiny [has a] gift for dreaming up otherwise smart women who lapse into temporary insanity while besotted."
5. • premium: False
   • source: Justine Kenin, NPR
   • content: "Each story in Katherine Heiny's collection doles out gems that are so authentic and outrageous I wanted to read them out loud to a friend over the phone...Be ready to laugh and hoot, and then buy Single, Carefree, Mellow for all your girlfriends -- but probably not your mother-in-law."
6. • premium: False
   • source: Megan Angelo, Glamour.com
   • content: "Chances are you've already heard the buzz on this collection of short stories, each of which has a relationship or affair at its center. But no matter how good you imagine it is, it's better. Seemingly, there isn't a lying woman Heiny can't make you love; there isn't a devastating situation she can't make you laugh during . . . I promise, you'll find a cathartic, strikingly personal moment somewhere in these stories, even if you've never been a mistress or put your dog to sleep (yes, bring tissues for that one)."
7. • premium: False
   • source: The Atlantic
   • content: "'How to Give the Wrong Impression' falls somewhere between Anne Beattie and Patricia Highsmith--a young girl starts to pretend her roommate Boris is her domestic partner, and then takes it way too far. This--everyday life, slightly tweaked--is Heiny's territory, and her investigations manage to be both heartbreaking and darkly comic."
8. • premium: False
   • source: Rebecca Schinsky, Inbox/Outbox on Bookriot
   • content: "Don't start this collection of short stories at bedtime unless you are willing to lose some sleep . . . Heiny captures the funny, awful, awkward, touching moments of young women's lives in a voice that is fresh and honest and basically the opposite of the get-off-my-grass Millennial-haters who sometimes think they've got the market cornered on literary writing. I thought I'd dip in and out of it, and instead I devoured it whole. Great stuff."
9. • premium: False
   • source: Kirkus (starred)
   • content: "Heiny explores sex, relationships and the internal lives of young women in this charmingly candid collection of short stories. The women who populate the pages of Heiny's disarming debut are girlfriends, mistresses and wives. They are best friends, roommates and lovers. They are intelligent but not always ambitious--keenly insightful but sometimes, perhaps willfully, blind to their own deeper desires--with loyalties and libidos that may be at odds and morals that may be in question. Despite the title, not all are single (or carefree or mellow), but they are all singular, and following their stories is like sitting at a dive bar tossing back deceptively pretty, surprisingly strong drinks with a pal who may not always make the best decisions but always comes away with the most colorful tales... These young women are sympathetic and slyly seductive, sometimes selfish and maddeningly un-self-aware, but they are beguil
10. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      September 15, 2014
      Dissatisfied teenagers and bored housewives, clueless boyfriends and cuckolded husbands, and 11 variations on the recurrent theme of infidelity and its fallout populate Heiny’s first collection of stories. “The Dive Bar” shows a woman cajoled into having drinks with her lover’s more sophisticated wife; unsurprisingly, the tête–à–tête ends doesn’t end well. “Blue Heron Bridge” finds a physique-obsessed mother consumed by an affair with an aging personal trainer. In the second-person “The Rhett Butlers,” a teenager embarks on a tour of seedy hotel rooms and blah sex with her smarmy high school history teacher. A man leaves a dalliance with a woman he met on Facebook for a gal whose tweets he admires in “Cranberry Relish.” Three of the offerings—“Dark Matter,” “Grendel’s Mother,” and the title story—follow the romantic entanglements and discontented musings of one character through marriage to her long-time boyfriend and pregnancy. But it’s hard to care about her fate when her snarky asides about life’s superficialities and near-constant critique of herself (and her relationship) continue unabated, despite her changed circumstances. First printing: 50,000 copies.

11. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      Starred review from December 1, 2014
      Heiny explores sex, relationships and the internal lives of young women in this charmingly candid collection of short stories.The women who populate the pages of Heiny's disarming debut are girlfriends, mistresses and wives. They are best friends, roommates and lovers. They are intelligent but not always ambitious-keenly insightful but sometimes, perhaps willfully, blind to their own deeper desires-with loyalties and libidos that may be at odds and morals that may be in question. Despite the title, not all are single (or carefree or mellow), but they are all singular, and following their stories is like sitting at a dive bar tossing back deceptively pretty, surprisingly strong drinks with a pal who may not always make the best decisions but always comes away with the most colorful tales. In fact, "The Dive Bar" is the title of the first story. In it, we meet Sasha, an attractive 26-year-old writer whose boyfriend has left his wife for her. After a confrontation with the boyfriend's wife, Sasha reluctantly mulls the morality of her choices, but for her, morality is really (boringly) beside the point, and she instead finds herself sinking sideways into the next chapter of her life, a happy one, from all indications. Heiny's characters often find themselves propelled through life by circumstances: The death of a beloved dog can lead inexorably to marriage, pregnancy and secret affairs, as it does for Maya, the protagonist of three of these stories, and her kind, kindred-spirit boyfriend/fiance/husband, Rhodes. Not all the women here are as appealing as Sasha and Maya, and the less we like them, the less charmed we may be by their careless misbehavior. By the end of the book-as by the end of a night at the bar with our metaphorical, engagingly louche friend-we might not find ourselves overly reluctant to part company. These young women are sympathetic and slyly seductive, sometimes selfish and maddeningly un-self-aware, but they are beguilingly human, and readers will yield to their charms.

      COPYRIGHT(2014) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

12. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      January 1, 2015
      Adultery abounds in Heiny's engaging debut collection, in which various female characters dissect their longings in the midst of everyday reality. In The Dive Bar, New Yorker Sasha agrees to a sit-down with her boyfriend's wife but becomes increasingly agitated in advance of their meeting. Set in suburbia, Blue Heron Bridge follows housewife Nina as her extramarital affair with a personal trainer unravels owing, in part, to her own insecurities. In the astute Cranberry Relish, the married Josie finds herself passed over by a former lover, whom she met on Facebook, for his newfound Twitter companion. Several stories follow librarian and web designer Maya, who begins to question the boundaries of her long-term relationship with her quirky boyfriend, Rhodes. The standout title tale juxtaposes their relationship against the terminal decline of Maya's beloved dog. In Dark Matter, the bond between the two is further put to the test when Maya strikes up an affair with her boss. Heiny's 11 stories are heightened by her depictions of her characters' internal struggles as they candidly confront their infidelities and other desires.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)

13. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      Starred review from October 1, 2014
      

      In this funny and heartfelt debut story collection, few characters are single and even fewer are carefree--though most long to be. Instead, they are remorseful about their disloyalties, torn between spouses and secret lovers, and guilt-ridden over the betrayals they commit in the name of love. In the title story, we encounter Maya as she faces the death of her beloved dog, Bailey, contemplates leaving her boyfriend of five years (she is sadder about the dog), and confronts her feelings for her alluring veterinarian. Maya, who appears in several more stories in various stages of life and love, is one of many captivating characters expertly imagined by Heiny. For instance, in the "The Dive Bar," a woman receives a phone call from her lover's wife, asking her to meet for a drink, and in "How To Give a Wrong Impression," the finest story in the collection, a young woman yearns for her roommate--a man oblivious of her feelings who comes to her for dating advice. VERDICT Essential reading for short story and fiction lovers, this is an exceptionally humorous collection by a talented new writer. [See Prepub Alert, 8/25/14.]--Lisa Block, Atlanta

      Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

14. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      September 15, 2014
      

      Lots of short story collections have been coming my way lately, and early 2015 seems especially rich in that regard. This debut collection, featuring women facing emotional conundrum, bowled me over on first read. The 50,000-copy first printing says a lot.

      Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

15. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      October 1, 2014
      

      In this funny and heartfelt debut story collection, few characters are single and even fewer are carefree--though most long to be. Instead, they are remorseful about their disloyalties, torn between spouses and secret lovers, and guilt-ridden over the betrayals they commit in the name of love. In the title story, we encounter Maya as she faces the death of her beloved dog, Bailey, contemplates leaving her boyfriend of five years (she is sadder about the dog), and confronts her feelings for her alluring veterinarian. Maya, who appears in several more stories in various stages of life and love, is one of many captivating characters expertly imagined by Heiny. For instance, in the "The Dive Bar," a woman receives a phone call from her lover's wife, asking her to meet for a drink, and in "How To Give a Wrong Impression," the finest story in the collection, a young woman yearns for her roommate--a man oblivious of her feelings who comes to her for dating advice. VERDICT Essential reading for short story and fiction lovers, this is an exceptionally humorous collection by a talented new writer. [See Prepub Alert, 8/25/14.]--Lisa Block, Atlanta

      Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

popularity

655

links

• self:
  • href: https://api.overdrive.com/v1/collections/v1L1BWwAAAA2I/products/c50992e9-5cde-4236-825a-a954023d4af6/metadata
  • type: application/vnd.overdrive.api+json

id

c50992e9-5cde-4236-825a-a954023d4af6

starRating

3.6

images

• cover:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-100/0111-1/{C50992E9-5CDE-4236-825A-A954023D4AF6}Img100.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg
• thumbnail:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-200/0111-1/{C50992E9-5CDE-4236-825A-A954023D4AF6}Img200.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg
• cover150Wide:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-150/0111-1/C50/992/E9/{C50992E9-5CDE-4236-825A-A954023D4AF6}Img150.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg
• cover300Wide:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-400/0111-1/C50/992/E9/{C50992E9-5CDE-4236-825A-A954023D4AF6}Img400.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg

isPublicPerformanceAllowed

False

languages

1. • code: en
   • name: English

subjects

1. • value: Fiction
2. • value: Literature
3. • value: Humor (Fiction)

publishDateText

02/03/2015

otherFormatIdentifiers

1. • type: ISBN
   • value: 9780385353632

mediaType

eBook

shortDescription

For the commitment-averse women in these eleven sublime laugh-out-loud stories, falling in love is never easy and always inconvenient. 
“Single, Carefree, Mellow is a lot like the women who populate it: smart and sexy and a little bit ruthless.” —Entertainment Weekly
“Something like Cheever mixed with Ephron.” —The New York Times Book Review

Maya is in love with both her boyfriend and her boss. Sadie’s lover calls her as he drives to meet his wife at marriage counseling. Nina is more worried that the Presbyterian minister living above her garage will hear her kids swearing than that he will find out she’s sleeping with her running partner. 
The women grapple with love amidst everything from unwelcome houseguests to disastrous birthday parties as Katherine Heiny spins a debut that is superbly accomplished and endlessly entertaining.
 

sortTitle

Single Carefree Mellow Stories

crossRefId

1903964

subtitle

Stories

publisher

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

bisacCodes

1. • code: FIC016000
   • description: Fiction / Humorous / General
2. • code: FIC019000
   • description: Fiction / Literary
3. • code: FIC044000
   • description: Fiction / Contemporary Women