DADDY
By Emma Cline
Random House, September 1, 2020
An absentee father collects his son from boarding school after a shocking act of violence. A nanny to a celebrity family hides out in Laurel Canyon in the aftermath of a tabloid scandal. A young woman sells her underwear to strangers. A notorious guest arrives at a placid, not-quite rehab in the Southwest.
In ten remarkable stories, Emma Cline portrays moments when the ordinary is disturbed, when daily life buckles, revealing the perversity and violence pulsing under the surface. She explores characters navigating the edge, the limits of themselves and those around them: power dynamics in families, in relationships, the distance between their true and false selves. They want connection, but what they provoke is often closer to self-sabotage. What are the costs of one’s choices? Of the moments when we act, or fail to act? These complexities are at the heart of Daddy, Emma Cline’s sharp-eyed illumination of the contrary impulses that animate our inner lives.
Selected Praise
"When I read Emma Cline I think of Mary Gaitskill’s psychological acuity and of Joy Williams’s sardonic gravitas. And yet something about Cline’s intimate tone, her talent for conjuring the feeling of being alive, is entirely and uniquely her own." — Rachel Kushner, author of The Mars Room
“Cline’s 10 stories constitute a riveting, timely tapestry of realizations, motivations, and desires.” — Booklist
“Brilliant, dark…. Cline’s fiction is full of binaries pressing up against one another: youthful promise and life’s realities; success and failure; darkness and humor; external beauty and internal rot.” — Wall Street Journal
“Cline’s sharply-drawn characters are the cowed, contemplative survivors of self-inflicted trauma, both seismic and quotidian…. Cline writes with such grace and precision that every sentence is a joy to absorb.” — Lit Hub
“Explore[s] similar terrain to Cline’s eerie and lyrical bestselling debut, The Girls: the power dynamics within families, characters who sabotage themselves, acts of violence.” —Vulture
About the Author
Emma Cline is the author of The Girls, which was shortlisted for the Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize and the John Leonard Award from the National Book Critics Circle. She received the Plimpton Prize from The Paris Review and was chosen as one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists. She is from Northern California.