Did not work for me. Too long, too neutral. I could not hang to anything. Maybe there was one or two story that gripped me.

A selection of short stories about American women at various stages of their lives, either describing a specific time or moving through their whole lives. Each story plunges you straight into the characters world, as if diving into a pool, without preamble or exploration, but with style and grace. Through them we discover the world they inhabit, mostly middle class, white New York. With moments of brilliance, I found myself captivated, best to pause after each story though, I imagine that otherwise it could become repetitive. I did enjoy hearing so many women's voices, especially the different ways and types of desire that were explored in this collection.

With thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Objects of desire is a collection of stories following a number of very different characters. The thread tying these stories together is their desire - sexual desire, longing, ambition, love. Desire takes many forms in this collection and I appreciated the stories for their complexity and humanity.

Some of the stories in the collection are much bigger in their scope and intentions, however I much preferred the more interior stories, where we were in the mind of one character. We got to explore their thoughts, feelings and relationships first hand and I found I connected with these characters more than others. I would have to say, most of the stories in this collection all felt like they were trying to do too much. There was either too many plot elements, or too many characters or were too meandering in their storytelling.

My favourite story in the collection was Now You Know. Here, we follow a young artist who opens the story with a discussion around secrets and being a secret keeper. It seems her family members always confide in her. She paints portraits of people and finds that each of the paintings has her own eyes. I loved this image, and the idea that this young girl is all seeing. This story made me ask so many questions, and I loved it for that.

I really enjoyed Sestanovich’s writing, and would probably read a novel of hers, but these stories just didn’t have that overall sense of completeness for me and I finished each one slightly dissatisfied.

Objects of Desire is a collection of 11 short stories about relationships and what we desire. Usually short story collections can be a bit hit and miss, with the reader connecting with some stories and not liking others. Unfortunately OoD was a total miss for me. I couldn't connect with any of the stories and found it all just a bit floppy and meaningless. It felt very apparent that the author is from your classic all white, high income, high achieving, upper class American family and is writing about what she knows.
Not one for me but I'm guessing I'm not the target audience and many do seem to have enjoyed it.

This book contains eleven short stories about women’s lives and as I hadn’t read any short stories recently I was intrigued. Its been hailed as a “Mostly Anticipated Book of 2021’ by Lithub and Millions - so that certainly made me want to dive in.
The stories are well told and the characters nicely depicted, but and I suppose its the nature of short stories for some of the characters I was left wanting more. The writing is to the point and almost just functional and I found that worked better for some stories than others. Although some of the characters were fascinating I didn’t warm to many of them and found I had absolutely no connection or empathy for them. The structure of some of the stories is unusual too in that some just abruptly end. Maybe because it just felt so American and distant from my own life experience, I did struggle a bit with caring about any of what was happening, but then again some of the characters didn’t seem to care either. As you can probably guess from this painful review, I liked the book but its hard to describe well. If you like short stories, modern fiction and an American viewpoint give it a go.
Thanks to the publisher, Pan Macmillian - Picador and the author for the opportunity to read the e-arc ahead of publication.

Pithy stories about desire. These stories by Clare Sestanovich are short yet full of desire. I would recommend this collection to anyone looking to embrace and discover short stories .

I love short story collections and this was no different. Some of the stories had satisfying conclusions and others stopped rather abruptly but I found the stories so enjoyable that I didn’t mind. I think any reader will be able to find themselves in any one of these stories.

Thoroughly enjoyed this book. Each story resonated with me in a different way. The characters were so honest and realistic, I truly saw a piece of myself in each one. I can't wait to see what Clare Sestanovich writes next.

What a brilliant writer! I can’t fault it. The book zipped along with the kind of prose that is a joy to read. I wanted it to last longer.

I absolutely loved these short stories, they’re all so different but they form a true collection and the writing style is exactly to my taste, I could have read another entire book of them! Highly recommended, thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

This book contains eleven short stories about women’s lives and as I hadn’t read any short stories recently I was intrigued. Its been hailed as a “Mostly Anticipated Book of 2021’ by Lithub and Millions - so that certainly made me want to dive in.
The stories are well told and the characters nicely depicted, but and I suppose its the nature of short stories for some of the characters I was left wanting more. The writing is to the point and almost just functional and I found that worked better for some stories than others. Although some of the characters were fascinating I didn’t warm to many of them and found I had absolutely no connection or empathy for them. The structure of some of the stories is unusual too in that some just abruptly end. Maybe because it just felt so American and distant from my own life experience, I did struggle a bit with caring about any of what was happening, but then again some of the characters didn’t seem to care either. As you can probably guess from this painful review, I liked the book but its hard to describe well. If you like short stories, modern fiction and an American viewpoint give it a go.
Thanks to the publisher, Pan Macmillian - Picador and the author for the opportunity to read the e-arc ahead of publication.

These were really enjoyable! I liked the fact that the heroines of these short stories aren't all sad millennials (I am getting tired of all the books about sad millennials) and include older characters too - all women, all dealing with various dramas in their personal lives, and all pretty unsatisfied with their lives. The writing is quite sparse, and you feel rather detached from the characters, but the details create a picture; Clare Sestanovich pokes fun at the writers of such minimalist stories. In one way or another her heroines are all longing for something more, and many of them have literary aspirations. The first story, 'Annunciation', was maybe my least favourite; some of them were just fantastic windows on the mundanity of the characters' private lives - 'Wants and Needs' my favourite probably for the minutiae of Val's daily life and her boredom.

I read the idea that this was highly anticipated and a set of short stories and was intrigued. Unfortunately it was not for me. The stories are so short they do not really develop and I could not see what the author was trying to tell in many. The first story alone left me wondering as it seems to have no real conclusion to it and I wondered if the next story linked in only to find it did not. It is also highly American in its content so did not really work for me.

I hardly ever read short stories, having obsessively read many during my time at university studying American literature. From Charlotte Perkins Gilman to Ernest Hemingway and now Sestanonivch is carving out a niche in her debut collection of stories. I found most of the eleven to be rich in empathy for each of the main characters; seeing what life is like for those in alien situations - a woman obsessing about being pregnant with her married lover's child and a woman reaching out to her old English teacher seemingly for advice and answers on life and love to name just a couple. I found them typically American if that makes sense. That's not to say that they are saccharine in any way but quite avant garde and experimental in form. Some appeared to almost hang as if not totally finished but rather than see this as strange, I viewed it as experimental. Knowing Sestanovich is the the editor of The New Yorker this collection has made me want to read some of her editorials. Interesting and thought-provoking.

Objects of Desire is a debut collection of eleven stories that lay bare the beauties and ironies of contemporary life — stories laced with sly and disarming power that announce an extraordinary new literary voice to the landscape. In these pithy stories, Sestanovich takes seemingly innocuous quotidian moments and pulls out satisfying human drama. Often anything goes in a short story anthology allowing the author more freedom to bounce around between completely different stories, or alternatively, they may choose to set a theme that connects each of the tales they tell, but one thing is for certain, crafting a collection that hits the mark can often have more impact than a full-length novel because, as they say, variety is the spice of life.

In the series opener, Annunciation, college freshman Iris is flying home and strikes up an odd, ephemeral friendship with the older married couple seated next to her on the aeroplane; she also questions the bizarre nature of the lives she is surrounded by, which then gives way to the rest of her life. Successor graphic designer and founder of her own prominent firm, Suzanne is the main character in By Design. She finds herself under threat when she is sued by a younger male colleague for apparent sexual harassment. The situation becomes even more destructive than anticipated and she ends upending her marriage, abandoning her business, scrapping her current wardrobe and moving into a high rise apartment. And then Suzanne’s son asks her to design his wedding invitations when he informs her of his engagement.

In these stories, thrilling desire and melancholic yearning animate women's lives--from the brink of adulthood, to the labyrinthine path between twenty and thirty, to middle age, when certain possibilities quietly elapse. With powerful observation and mordant humour, Clare Sestanovich opens up a fictional world where intimate and uncomfortable truths lie hidden in plain sight. Objects of Desire is a book pulsing with subtle drama, rich with unforgettable scenes and alive with moments of recognition, each more startling than the last--a spellbinding, brilliant debut. Short, witty and elegant stories explore themes of identity, yearning, aspiration, family and, above all else, desire. Highly recommended.

I’m not even sure what I mean by this, but it feels descriptive to say that the stories in this collection are very American. The, mostly young and female, protagonists and narrators are earnest and tired of the lives they’re leading in big and lonely cities. Their deep feelings are described by Sestanovich with distance and hard edges. I appreciated the work of the stories, but I can’t say that I loved any of them particularly.

I enjoyed this short story collection immensely - each one was worth the read and added something to the whole, and I already am keen to reread them. The stories all loosely explore female desire and emotion, honing in on the weird, transgressive and antisocial behaviours or patterns of desire demonstrated by the book's female characters. Taking characters like an older woman with a workplace sexual harassment case that takes her as the predator, to the woman harbouring romantic/sexual feelings for her younger sort-of stepbrother, the book does not flinch at the murky depths that female desire can 'fall' to, but amplifies them - depicts them in sharp, vivid detail and embeds them in a narrative that makes them understandable as well as strange or uncomfortable. For me, the women are above all real and believable; no matter how strange or socially unacceptable, no moment struck me as truly 'wrong' or unrealistic.

Moreover, it was actually comforting to me to see these kinds of women depicted, to have their thoughts shared and their actions and emotions justified simply by the fact they do and feel them. Female desire is so poorly portrayed throughout literary history, and so to have the lives and inner lives of these women presented unashamedly, in a way that does not absolve them of wrongdoing but does not indict them either, brings female desire to a neutral point - a vital place that is not celebratory or condemning, a place saying that female desire is real and normal and isn't going anywhere no matter how strange the face it wears.

Each story captures a 'moment' in a woman's life in a hazy, ephemeral way. Each moment feels fleeting, vividly depicted and then gone, onto the next one in an interconnected stream of female desire and psyche. This collection feels so well-linked and cohesive that it was incredibly enjoyable to read, and I cannot wait to see what Sestanovich does next.

Writing a great short story is always a bit of a balancing act: you have to trace the arc of a pithy plot while saying something profound. Sestanovich creates a fantastic sense of atmosphere in these stories, always stretching towards profundity, but her plots never quite pull their weight.

The stories in Objects of Desire read almost like variations on a theme, with the characters and situations seeming almost interchangeable. This means that while the first few stories land an impact, there comes a point where they all start to blur into one.

That said, Objects of Desire is a promising debut. I loved Sestanovich's thoughtful, dream-like prose, and there is an almost tangible sense of tension running through the core of each story.

I'm not sure how this made it on to my tbr pile,but I'm glad it did.
I'm not always a fan of short stories,and here as always,there were some I liked more than others.
Overall though I enjoyed the writing style,and found myself smiling or nodding along in agreement to something I read.
I'll definitely be on the look out for anything else by the author. ...more

Genre: Short Stories

Release Date: Expected 22nd July 2021

Publisher: Pan Macmillan - Picador


Having being hailed as a 'Mostly Anticipated Book of 2021' by Lithub and The Millions, Objects of Desire definitely has a certain unique charm about it, a voice that is sure to make it's mark on the literary world.

Featuring eleven stories that delve into the hidden world of womens desires and wants, their interior thoughts that are rarely brought to the surface. From childish yearning to aching desire, this looks into the many facets of life from relationships and envy, to motherhood in all it's incarnations, to growing older and growing up.

From a young woman who spends her days imagining what it would be like to be pregnant with her married lover, to a sucessful graphic designer trying to celebrate her sons wedding while dealing with sexual assault allegations, to a woman who hasn't seen her old lover since she had an abortion many years ago until she suddenly bumped into him and a young girl talking to an old teacher about trying to understand herself as a whole person - this collection spans eleven very different lives joined together with one unique voice. Stand-outs for me were Security Questions and By Design in particular.

This collection was written in a somewhat dream-like prose to me, very atmospheric and thoughtful. Each with a very delicately uneasy aura and dryly amusing observations, each story felt very cleverly crafted as being so different yet familiar at the same time. I felt that some of the stories fell slightly short, and while I know not all stories need an ending, it felt as though many of them ended mid-sentence without the time for the reader to fully absorb the characters and their meanings.

Objects of Desire is definitely a wonderful debut, I'm very curious to see what Sestanovich does next.

RATING: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Thank you to Clare Sestanovich, Pan Macmillan and netgalley for this ARC in return for an honest review.