CARA BLUE ADAMS
“Those moments of joy or beauty, I want to record them and get them down. The moments of confusion or pain I want to capture precisely, too, because they also feel like a crucial part of being alive. Longing, or missing something and wanting to spend time with it again in my mind is certainly a reason that I write, but I'm not sure that I can pin it down.”
“The structural originality and expansive sweep of stories in You Never Get It Back reveal a writer of impressive insight and technical virtuosity . . . Cara Blue Adams has written a modern classic of a collection, as effortless in its idiom as it is fearless in its consideration of contemporary life. These stories left me breathless.”
“Cara Blue Adams writes with immense sensitivity and precision, transforming seemingly ordinary moments into radiant insight, as she charts Kate’s journey through landscapes and relationships, solitude and connection, bliss and grief. As she moves through time, Kate begins to understand—as do we—that the questions might matter even more than the answers. You Never Get It Back is a stunning debut, marking the arrival of an original and thrilling new voice.”
“Cara Blue Adams’s evocative first book is described as a collection of interlinked short stories, though it could easily be classified as a novel without the padding . . . Adams succeeds in capturing the microcosm of a young woman’s ordinary struggle in modern America, and it turns out to be pretty devastating.”
“Adams’s ornate linked collection comprises snapshots of a woman’s life at various points of change . . . a dynamic and memorable character study.”
Cara Blue Adams is the author of the interlinked story collection You Never Get It Back (University of Iowa Press, 2021), which was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice and awarded the John Simmons Short Fiction Prize, judged by Brandon Taylor, who calls it “a modern classic.” It was shortlisted for the Mary McCarthy Prize and longlisted for the Story Prize. Over twenty-five of her stories appear in leading literary magazines, including Granta, The Kenyon Review, American Short Fiction, Epoch, and Electric Literature, and she is the recipient of Kenyon Review Short Fiction Prize, the Missouri Review William Peden Prize in Fiction, and the Meringoff Prize in Fiction. Her stories have twice been selected as Pushcart Prize Notables.
She is also the recipient of a Center for Fiction Emerging Writer Fellowship and has received fellowships and support from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, the Lighthouse Works, the VCCA, and the New York State Council on the Arts. Her essays and criticism appear in The New Yorker, Bookforum, and The Believer. She is a former co-editor of The Southern Review, and an essay about that experience is anthologized in The Little Magazine in Contemporary America (University of Chicago Press, 2015).
In an interview with BOMB, she was asked what drew her to the form of the linked short story collection. “I find the linked collection endlessly fascinating,” she responded. “One thing it allows you to do—which a novel would at least make harder, if not disallow—is to shine a light on specific moments in a character's life without necessarily needing to create connective tissue between them. It allows for more white space and disjuncture. It's more like a little constellation of lights instead of a shooting star.”
A graduate of Smith College, she holds an MFA from the University of Arizona. She is an associate professor at Seton Hall University and lives in Brooklyn and the Hudson Valley.
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