Swan Songs
Swan Songs is the debut short story collection by poet and novelist B. Elizabeth Beck. In this book we meet thirteen women and witness thirteen lives at the backdrop of thirteen types of music.
"The house of fiction that B. Elizabeth Beck constructs in Swan Songs is inhabited by people we recognize—a woman fretting about the onset of menopause, an art history graduate working in a diner and trying to hide her identity, a fastidious suburban mom celebrating Christmas in July, a middle-aged wife playing and living out the soundtrack of her life, an abused wife who hopes her husband will 'wind down like a toy with low batteries.' They are none of us, they are all of us. These thirteen stories—many of them more like capsules of memory or character studies—are masterful, treated with minutely imagined details and a deftness that resonates with authenticity and insight, woven with music as only Beck can do."—Richard Taylor
What Others Say
The house of fiction that B. Elizabeth Beck constructs in Swan Songs is inhabited by people we recognize—a woman fretting about the onset of menopause, an art history graduate working in a diner and trying to hide her identity, a fastidious suburban mom celebrating Christmas in July, a middle-aged wife playing and living out the soundtrack of her life, an abused wife who hopes her husband will "wind down like a toy with low batteries." They are none of us, they are all of us. These thirteen stories—many of them more like capsules of memory or character studies—are masterful, treated with minutely imagined details and a deftness that resonates with authenticity and insight, woven with music as only Beck can do.
In B. Elizabeth Beck's Swan Songs women mourn, grieve, grow, love and explore new paths to an internal soundtrack of modern classics from the Grateful Dead to Dolly Parton. Touching, powerful, and relatable, these stories will linger with you long after you read them.
About the Author
