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Do You Know What I’m Not Telling You?

Do You Know What I’m Not Telling You? is a collection of stories about New Yorkers—a wannabe cabaret singer, a dermatologist attracted to a frustrated poet, a single man trying to adopt a baby, a lonely stay-at-home dad. They struggle with careers and family as they fall in and out of love in a city that can be frustrating—but is also romantic and alluring.

Author: Karen Wunsch
Paperback : 222 pages
ISBN-10 : 194717519X
ISBN-13 : 978-1947175198

About the Author

Karen Wunsch has published stories and essays in Epoch, The Literary Review, Columbia Journal, the Michigan Quarterly Review, and other journals. She taught writing and literature at Queensborough Community College. She lives in New York City.

Do You Know What I’m Not Telling You? is a collection of stories about New Yorkers—a wannabe cabaret singer, a dermatologist attracted to a frustrated poet, a single man trying to adopt a baby, a lonely stay-at-home dad. They struggle with careers and family as they fall in and out of love in a city that can be frustrating—but is also romantic and alluring.

In her brilliant new collection of stories, Do You Know What I’m Not Telling You?, Karen Wunsch writes with uncommon lucidity about the longing that goes unseen within New York City apartments, the secret solaces of lonely women on playgrounds and at work, and the loves of the lucky few. Her disarming observations of daily life— the absurd moment, the unpredicted gesture—have a wholly original charm. Like a classic song full of wit and heart, these stories will stick with you.

—René Steinke, author of Friendswood

Witty, poignant, and often surprising, this delightful collection is a rueful meditation on the many forms of romantic love—and a love letter to New York City.

—Elisabeth Gitter, author of The Imprisoned Guest

Do You Know What I’m Not Telling You? is a wonderful and perfectly titled book. The characters here all orbit each other, circle around each other and their desires, their histories, their hopes and losses and loves, as if each story were a literary pas de deux. Elegantly written, every story is finally a love story, an expression of hope, both elegant and spare, completely surprising and completely true.

—W. Scott Olsen, author of A Moment with Stranger

Even if you don’t live in New York, Karen Wunsch’s collection of intimate short stories will make you feel like a native. Wunsch takes to Manhattan streets with the precise eye of an urban archeologist. Whether her characters are in a yoga studio, a coffee shop, or just walking down the street, her prose is vivid and surprising, but never more so than when she writes about relationships and the humor and neurotic baggage that come with them. As one of her characters might say, her stories glisten like Central Park after a rainstorm.

—Betsy Carter, author of We Were Strangers Once

These are wonderful stories, the kind you can’t stop reading, subtle and rich, full of encounters between oddly matched people. They exist in ordinary time, then end in distinctive, timeless, illuminating ways. A world is created, urban, suburban, full of births, deaths and marriages, full of small troubles and big ones, full of life, in short.

—Myra Goldberg, author of Whistling and Other Stories

There is an effortless quality to Karen Wunsch’s stories that belies their careful architecture, a tranquility that belies a deep desire. Her characters move as if through dreams of their own lives, rearranging details here and there, scheming about improvement, all the while sensing that an awakening could come through the next doorway. Her characters yearn too for deeper connection with other lives, are consumed with the ways others promise to complete us.

—Peter Grimes, Editor, Pembroke Magazine

Karen Wunsch’s stories crackle with ambivalent passions and latent sabotage. This chilling debut collection introduces us to a writer who has an almost forensic understanding of human frailty.

—Minna Zallman Proctor, Editor, The Literary Review

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Jack Smith, The Writer Magazine