Helen on 86th Street and Other Stories

In Helen on 86th Street and Other Stories, girls grow into women and women become wise in portraits filled with biting humor and small but hard-earned victories. One girl makes a burnt offering of letters written to her wayward father, while another struggles to leave her dying father and face adult life. Women navigate the rocky shoals of adultery, illness, and infertility as they make their way in an unsteady world, where the heart is easily betrayed and loyalty is rarely a straightforward matter. Wendi Kaufman writes intimately of daughters, mothers, and lovers, of first loves and difficult truths. This is the long-awaited celebration of a wry, unblinking, and ultimately triumphant literary voice.

In Helen on 86th Street and Other Stories, girls grow into women and women become wise in portraits filled with biting humor and small but hard-earned victories. One girl makes a burnt offering of letters written to her wayward father, while another struggles to leave her dying father and face adult life. Women navigate the rocky shoals of adultery, illness, and infertility as they make their way in an unsteady world, where the heart is easily betrayed and loyalty is rarely a straightforward matter. Wendi Kaufman writes intimately of daughters, mothers, and lovers, of first loves and difficult truths. This is the long-awaited celebration of a wry, unblinking, and ultimately triumphant literary voice.

Wendi Kaufman's fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Fiction, and Other Voices, and her stories have been anthologized in Scribner’s Best of the Fiction Workshops, Elements of Literature, and Faultlines: Stories of Divorce. She was the recipient of a literary fellowship from the Virginia Commission for the Arts, the winner of a Mary Roberts Rhinehart award for short fiction, and was named a Breadloaf Scholar in Fiction. Formerly a frequent contributor to The Washington Post and The Washingtonian, Kaufman graduated from George Mason University's MFA program in Creative Writing. Helen on 86th Street and Other Stories is her first story collection.