Creek Walk and Other Stories

Critics agree: Molly Giles is a master storyteller. Creek Walk and Other Stories shares arresting insights into the comic and tragic nature of life and the unflagging spirit to survive. The book's startling changes in styles, pace, and mood identify Giles as an astonishing and insightful artist. "...its best moments have a haunting resonance." (New York Times Book Review)

Giles is uncannily observant of women's lives, both the small details and the larger emotions that guide them. "Like Grace Paley, Giles writes exquisitely voice-driven stories." (Publishers Weekly) She artfully weaves tales of women struggling to emerge into their truest natures as they reach out, change their lives, and save themselves. These womendoctors, housewives, activists, students, and teachersbreak the old patterns that have held them back and kept them silent.

Verging on the surreal, Giles's "...powerful, honest storytelling" (Ms.) paints pictures of courageous women with an uncanny ability to pick up and go oneven if it's in the wrong direction. From love stories that include a woman who does everything right to seduce Mr. Wrong, and a jealous lover hunting through her boyfriend's house for "evidence" that can only destroy her, to stories around work and career in which a woman wonders why she was not promoted, and the members of a writing group struggle with envy then rise to the occasion when one of their members bursts into stardom, these stories are touching, sometimes alarming, and often funny.

Molly Giles is truly "...an undiscovered national treasure..." (Alan Cheuse, NPR book critic and author).

About the Author

Molly Giles's first collection, Rough Translations (University of Georgia Press, 1985), received the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, the Boston Globe Award, and the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award for Fiction. She has won numerous other awards for her work, including the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award and a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Award. Her fiction has been widely published in journals and magazines, including Redbook, San Francisco Review of Books Literary Supplement, New England Review, and Five Fingers Review. She has a masters in English and is an associate professor of creative writing at San Francisco State University. She lives in Woodacre, California.