Safety of Objects: Stories

Praise for The Safety of Objects: Stories by A. M. Homes

“Sharp, funny, and playful… Homes is confident and consistent in her odd departures from life as we know it, sustaining credibility by getting details right. A fully engaged imagination [is] at work — and play.”

— Amy Hempel, The Los Angeles Times

“Set in a world filled with edges to topple from, [The Safety of Objects] is permeated by the bizarre…. The unexpected emerges from the story itself, startling and unexpectedly right.”

— The Cleveland Plain Dealer

“A. M. Homes finds mystery without special effects or exotic underbellies. We get a tour through the action adventure of everyday fantasies. Many of Homes’s characters lead two lives, one on God’s most conventional little acre, one in some alternate universe.”

— Mirabella

“A collection of deft, off-center stories about bizarre situations and the people unwittingly thrust into them… The Safety of Objects takes us on a Twilight Zone tour of everyday life. After it’s over, the reader may have lost some sense of boundaries, but that’s all to the good. That’s what keeps life, and literature, fresh.”

— Detroit Free Press

“Homes’s surprises proceed out of a stranger, surrealistic fictional world…. One way or another, there’s no place like Homes and her stories.”

— San Francisco Examiner

“Homes’s vision may be relentlessly grim, but it’s undeniably vivid and uncomfortingly familiar…. [H]er singular voice has deftly chronicled a suburban collage of marriage, mortgages and, lurking just beneath the veneer, madness.”

— Rocky Mountain News

“A. M. Homes’s provocative and funny and sometimes very sad takes on contemporary suburban life impressed me enormously. The more bizarre things get, the more impressed one is by A. M. Homes’s skills as a realist, a portraitist of contemporary life at its more perverse.”

— David Leavitt

“These stories are remarkable. They are awesomely well written. In the sense of arousing fear and wonder in the reader they entertain, but what they principally bring us is a sense of recognition…. Here are all the things that even today, even in our frank outspoken times, we don’t talk about. We think of them punishingly in sleepless nights.”

— Ruth Rendell

“An unnerving glimpse through the windows of other people’s lives. A. M. Homes is a provocative and eloquent writer, and her vision of the way we live now is anything but safe.”

— Meg Wolitzer

“A. M. Homes’s fresh and determined young voice emerges with vigor in this engaging collection of stories. You know the world will hear more of her.”

— Thomas Keneally

“A. M. Homes has a real gift for using a single, sharp tool to make (or suggest, perhaps) an astute general observation. With little she makes much, a trait I much admire in these days of profuse and prolix novels.”

— Doris Grumbach