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Ocean State

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The stories of Ocean State roll over the reader like a wave. Family pleasures, marriage, the essential moments and mysteries of a seemingly ordinary world that break into magical territory before we can brace ourselves -- Jean McGarry puts us in life's rough seas with what the New York Times has called a 'deft, comic, and devastatingly precise' hand.Praise for Jean McGarry'A gifted observer, records with fidelity the daily minutiae of life and introspection.' -- Publishers Weekly'Ms. McGarry's stories have the feel of paintings by Edward Hopper. Her characters are solitudinous and lonely, rarely funny, but they often carry with them, even in their defeat, a certain dignity. She is a writer who honors the human condition.' -- Baltimore Sun'McGarry's thickly layered prose, with its stunning emotional accuracies, is always just on the verge of exploding into dream or fantasy.' -- Women's Review of Books'At her best, McGarry illuminates our quirky, flawed selves and neighbors, and makes us nod even as we sigh.' -- Providence Journal'McGarry's prose is fresh, her plots unpredictable, and her dialogue shimmeringly wry... Reading McGarry's stories is to be surprised and delighted.' -- Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

""Exceptionally intense, intricately structured, and as arresting and consistently engaging as fractal art... the stories trace characters' sense of a double existence: the life inside family, defined and constrained by McGarry's meticulous details, and the boundless life of the spirit. Her literary progenitors range from Willa Cather to Virginia Woolf'but she brings a savage lyricism to her stories, a sense of rage contained perilously by wit and intelligence, that gives the stories a menacing aspect, like watching a man threatening suicide walk on a ledge.""

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