The Invisible Art of Literary Editing
The Story I Tell Myself About Myself
Imagine Your Life Like This
Stories
University of Wisconsin Press, 2023
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“Reading these stories is a deeply participatory experience. Layden’s storytelling invites us to be witnesses rather than mere observers. Indeed, it’s easy to forget that we are reading and find ourselves living with the characters.”—Kathryn Ludwig, Indiana Authors Awards Book Reviews
”In elegiacally written sashays through doctors’ waiting rooms and seedy bars, (Layden) introduces characters on the cusp of emerging into better lives. Will they take the leap? Will they realise the significance of the thresholds at which we leave them? …Layden’s soaring themes encompass the full range of what it means to be human.”—Elizabeth Smith for Necessary Fiction
Milwaukee Magazine: “Four Books by Wisconsin-Connected Authors”
Imagine Your Life Like This on IndyStar’s Summer Reading List: 8 New Books by Indiana Authors to Bring to Your Book Club
Imagine Your Life Like This (and story “Nothing and Nobody”) recommended by Reunions Magazine
Praise for Imagine Your Life Like This
“Open this book and you’ll want to stay forever in Sarah Layden’s imagined world. Appealing characters with interesting conundrums act right up to the limits of possibility. Layden has an ear for the absurdity in fraught moments that turn out to plumb depths. These stories can bring you to tears even as you laugh out loud.”—Sharon Solwitz, author of Once, in Lourdes
“Well-written, varied, and intriguing, these stories are original and will stay with me for a long time.”—Kelly Fordon, author of I Have the Answer
“Sarah Layden writes about loneliness and disconnection with authority and beauty. Her characters are often flawed people in the midst of difficult circumstances whose stories unravel in surprising ways. She is a writer to watch.”—Marian Crotty, author of What Counts as Love
“The stories in Imagine Your Life Like This are unforgettable, with characters deftly portrayed, sometimes with a single memorable line. They have outsize vices, married men, and cookie binging. They lie, they steal, they act on violent impulses, yet I loved them and longed for redemption for each and every one. You want to believe that light boxes might solve their north-country-long-winter problems, but they know deep down that’s not true. I particularly connected with the sardonic, vulnerable women. They hide from the truth for a while, but inevitably truth is as necessary to them as a good meal, a strong drink. Brava, Sarah Layden!”—Patricia Henley, author of Other Heartbreaks and Hummingbird House
“A great collection of short stories can make you feel as though the writer is taking you on a tour of a specific place and time, like a novel, while focusing on the many individual lives that make up the whole. Imagine Your Life Like This is one of those books: a wise and deeply satisfying collection that illuminates the courage and humor of ordinary people in a place where a mountain of broken glass in the moonlight can be more beautiful than Christmas lights, and a yearbook photo can illuminate the kindness that saved your life. I loved these stories. I was sorry when one ended but always, and immediately, drawn in by the next.”—Susan Neville, author of The Town of Whispering Dolls
“Layden’s vividly-drawn characters struggle to define themselves in relation to who they used to be, who they want to be, and who others imagine them to be. In the midst of their various crises, they behave badly, make mistakes, and want what they can’t have, and yet in spite of—or maybe because of—their fallibility, they remain sympathetic and lovable. Imagine Your Life Like This is a crisp, compassionate, and moving examination of the difficulty of seeing ourselves clearly and the pain of being seen by others in ways we can’t control.”—Ashley Wurzbacher, author of Happy Like This
The Invisible Art of Literary Editing
By Bryan Furuness and Sarah Layden
Bloomsbury Academic, 2023
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The Story I Tell Myself About Myself
Winner of the 2017 Sonder Press Chapbook competition
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“The fifteen stories in Layden’s new collection—a follow-up to her powerhouse debut novel, Trip Through Your Wires—explore loss, loneliness, and life. The stories run the gamut from magical realism to realism that’s magical, each with Layden’s sharp wit, insightfully drawn characters, and unflinching prose.”—James Figy for Split Lip Magazine
“Sarah Layden’s flash fiction collection, The Story I Tell Myself About Myself, evokes ghosts of Sherwood Anderson’s well-known ‘grotesques’ in Winesburg, Ohio. Layden’s characters, too, are flawed and broken, grappling with isolation and desperation, attempting to endure their pain. And like Anderson’s, Layden’s characters are deeply worth the time and effort to understand them.”—Dheepa R. Maturi for PANK Magazine
“The Story I Tell Myself about Myself by Sarah Layden is a wonderful assemblage of pure storytelling genius. These fifteen stories are by turns heart-wrenching, funny, and deliciously surprising. Layden is a deft, intelligent writer at the height of her powers. Read this book, then seek out everything else she has written.”—Kathy Fish, author of Wild Life
“The Story I Tell Myself About Myself gives you no choice but this: stay. Stay with these characters and listen to what they have to tell you.”—Frannie McMillan for SmokeLong Quarterly
“This style/approach reminds me of one of my favorite authors, Aimee Bender, how she just throws her wildly creative and wonderful concepts out in the first sentence, then goes from there—I’ve tried to copy that for the last twenty years or so, to varying degrees of success. Layden is way better at it than me. That’s why I like this book so much, I think, because it reminds me of what I love about writing, what has always inspired me, what inspires me today.”—Michael Czyzniejewski, Story366
“To believe Layden tapped into a magic is to discredit the hard work she committed to crafting these stories, some dating back a decade. Still, each page crackles with energy you’d expect radiating from a wand, not from short prose.”—Joshua P. Flynn for NUVO
“Slippery, secretive, and sensual, Layden’s short fiction is simply magical.”—Dan Grossman & Laura McPhee for NUVO
“Sarah Layden’s excellent new chapbook is sleet and ice cracking. It’s ducks, boots, candles, and comets. It’s phone calls and packages; ham salad and ovulation. It’s so many things all pulled together with the strong, confident pen of Sarah Layden. These stories dwell in leaving and loss, displacement and memory. Layden lets the world in, breathes the world out. Join her.”—Sherrie Flick, author of Thank Your Lucky Stars
“Loss and disappointment permeate Layden’s stories, often fantastical allegories…we feel it, too, in the straight-shooting family narratives…Either way, the dead-on characterization grounds the reader…There is something familiar in Layden’s stories, and it stings.”—Thea Swanson, author of MARS and The Curious Solitude of Anise
Trip Through Your Wires
A novel
Engine Books, 2015
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Praise for Trip Through Your Wires:
“In this novel, the murder of Ben in a Mexican city has left his girlfriend Carey Halpern shell-shocked for seven years. When a new clue emerges that draws her back into the mystery of his death, Carey searches through her failing memory to recognize her blindness to the danger Ben courted.”—The Chicago Tribune
“Sarah Layden’s debut novel Trip Through Your Wires is a powerful and haunting examination of memory and loss.”—David Gutowski,Largehearted Boy
“Trip Through Your Wires is a welcome antidote to despair. Sarah Layden is the real thing.”—Kyle Minor, author of Praying Drunk
“Traumatized by her experience in Mexico, Carey Halpern is trying to snap out of her Prufrock-like trance. She’s smart and she’s funny. Now, if she can just solve her boyfriend’s murder. Sarah Layden is in complete control of time, language, and narrative in this beautiful story that has everything to do with how we live with our pasts.”—Margaret McMullan, author of Sources of Light
“Trip Through Your Wires is compulsively readable.”—Porter Shreve, author of The End of the Book
“In this haunting first novel, Sarah Layden constructs a machine of longing, capturing the minute maze of memory. Trip Through Your Wires is a patient, powerful, and profound emotional unraveling.”—Michael Martone, author of Four for a Quarter
“Layden intricately traces the maze of human memory, full of twists and dead ends. She shows how the past controls us, even when it’s misremembered or misinterpreted.”—James Figy, PANK Magazine