In "Leavers' Events," a teenage girl awaits exam results and has a sexual encounter with a teacher that she hopes will define her. In "Sunday's Child," a middle-aged actress evicts a homeless woman from her garden, which precipitates a crisis of conscience. In "The Bachelor's Table," a lawyer takes advantage of an accounting mistake and sets in motion a sequence of events that force him to evaluate his actions. In the title story, "Ether," a blocked writer plagiarizes his own life with devastating consequences.
All the characters in Evgenia Citkowitz's first collection of short fiction are connected by the quest for identity. Some are poised at a crossroads, while others teeter on the edge of a moral precipice. The stories are startlingly original, haunting, and often funny. From a hamster cage in Los Angeles to the bowels of the great houses of London and Long Island, Citkowitz depicts her characters' frailties and humanity with a mordant humor and tenderness that never diminish their complexity.
"Although Citkowitz trawls familiar territory, what she does with this material is unexpected and often startling. . . The kind of imaginative leap you expect in a poem, it gives an otherwise slight story a small radiance. . . Citkowitz has an impressive literary pedigree: her mother was the novelist Lady Caroline Blackwood, her stepfather the poet Robert Lowell. But her voice, particularly her rh
Ligaya Mishan, The New York Times Book Review
"Evgenia Citkowitz's Ether moves from Hollywood to estates in Long Island and London in pursuit of characters who inhabit glamour's shadow--a novelist married to a starlet, a famous fashion editor's daughter--but are compelled to stray outside socially acceptable margins."
Megan O'Grady, Vogue.com
"How coolly poised, Evgenia Ciktowitz's prose! And how elegantly and richly detailed her fictional worlds! It's something of a shock then to realize that in this debut collection the young author is depicting individuals devastated by emotion, if not decorticated, numbed . . . sharply observed, resolutely unsentimental, and wholly engaging."
