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BREAD AND SALT
Short Stories by Valerie Miner
Whitepoint Press

Bread and Salt reveals a master storyteller writing in her prime: searching, original, compassionate and witty. Miner’s deftly moves readers across the seas with lush prose and razor-sharp insight.  These stories celebrate the musical complexity of language while addressing real world themes of immigration, suicide, gun violence, state terrorism. 

They have been published in the best literary journals including Ploughshares, Five Points, The Michigan Quarterly Review and Southwest Review.  They range from mirco-fiction to novella navigating terror, grief, passion, and whimsy, yet each one shimmers with hope confirming once again that Valerie Miner is a writer necessary for the 21st century.

 

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Advance Praise:

“Once again, Valerie Miner has written a book I don’t want to put down. In Bread and Salt, Miner has constructed countless vibrant worlds. So many richly-drawn characters in this new collection! So many small treasures.”—Camille T. Dungy, author of Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History

“Bread and Salt is an exquisite read. It’s lyrical, humorous, and intensely human in rich and quirky ways. Hauntings interrupt conversations and dreams; predictable lives are blown open; chance encounters morph into lifelong intimacies. Miner deftly transports her characters -and the reader- across myriad emotional, political, and geographical terrains, leaving us breathless. A marvel of a collection.”—Patricia Powell, author of The Pagoda and The Fullness of Everything

“Meticulously observed, acutely felt, cosmopolitan in scope and vision, the stories in Valerie Miner’s Bread and Salt explore how, contrary to intuition, not being at home is ultimately the fundamental human condition. Whether that home takes the form of place, friends, lovers, or our own bodies, it will until the end remain wondrously, buoyantly, shatteringly unfinalizable.”  —Lance Olsen, author of My Red Heaven

“Across continents and oceans, in the waiting rooms that are the interstices of travel, through characters welcoming and leaving, Valerie Miner’s stories delineate the complex geometry of friendship both brief and lifelong.”—Carol Anshaw, author of Right after the Weather

Publication Date: September, 2020, https://whitepointpress.com/our-books/bread-and-salt-by-valerie-miner/

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IN OTHER NEWS

• Review of Ruth Ozeki’s The Book of Form and Emptiness, Women’s Review of Books, November/December, 2021
• Interview with Valerie Miner about the Novella Form, on Zack Rogow’s “Advice to Writers” Blog, 18 September, 2021, https://zackrogow.blogspot.com/2021/09/valerie-miner-on-novella.html?fbclid=IwAR0-8AK2X8zCVF6snj0-u1tRy-ImaRrG7ZHIbsZQL543Vbshj0YKRbNiXEQ
• Review of Lauren Groff, Matrix, San Francisco Chronicle, 12 September, 2021, https://datebook.sfchronicle.com/books /review-in-matrix-piety-and-poetry-break-through-bleak-life-of-englands-medieval-nuns
• Review of Wayward by Dana Spiotta, Women’s Review of Books, July/August, 2021
• University of Texas, El Paso, Reading and Discussion of Bread and Salt, November 2020. Click here for the recording.
• Visiting Artist, February-March, American Academy in Rome, 2020.
• Lecture, Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Track in Creative Writing at Bar Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel, 2019.
• Lectures and Workshops, Tel Hai College and Environs, Israel, 8-13 December, 2019
• Lecture, Institut Américain Universitaire, Aix, France, May 2, 2019
• Brown Fellowship to La Maison Dora Maar, Ménerbes, France, April 1-30, 2019