The Beauty of Their Youth
Short Stories
by Joyce Hinnefeld
paperback, 108 pages
2020
These are stories of awakening, but not in the “rite of passage” sense so familiar to American fiction. Here we awaken from the dream of the life we’ve been living purposefully for a long time. The five stories of The Beauty of Their Youth give a pointed precision to an insight that haunts Joyce Hinnefeld’s fine novels, namely, that mistaken perceptions and misguided decisions, rather than tragic flaws that must destroy us, are inextricably part of the ordinary texture of our lives. Our flaws, not foreign or ultimately even “wrong,” are intimately at home among the characteristic peculiarities that define our humanity. This is a vision that understands without excusing, joining the past self to the future self, and one person to another, in a community in which we share responsibility for the stories that we tell.
Reviews
These stories are such a joy: characters so tenderly and sharply rendered, their fates and moods and circumstances so unbearably specific. Hinnefeld has an unmistakable eye for American tensions and contradictions, and here we are asked to grapple with them in all their beauty and heartbreak.
—Carmen Machado, author of National Book Award finalist Her Body and Other Parties
Each of Joyce Hinnefeld’s stories in her marvelous new collection The Beauty of Their Youth contains a novel’s worth of original insight. Radiant with intelligence, these stories are beautiful and haunting, formally complex, and emotionally fulfilling. Her stories are discrete, finely rendered worlds, where the characters’ desires and regrets are met with fierce clarity and unflagging compassion. This is a deeply satisfying collection by a writer of great subtlety who reveals the manifold ways in which mysterious echoes from the past continue to resound.
—Lee Upton, author of The Tao of Humiliation and Visitations: Stories
In these sharp, smart, and surprising stories, Joyce Hinnefeld brings to life a range of remarkable characters—from a young girl straight out of Carson McCullers’ Member of the Wedding to a German tourist who finds an unexpected home in the swamplands of Florida. Reading this collection, I never knew what was going to happen next, and I loved the experience. This is a wonderful collection by a deeply gifted writer.
—Alix Ohlin, author of Dual Citizens
About the Author
Joyce Hinnefeld is the author of the short story collections Tell Me Everything (winner of the 1997 Bread Loaf Bakeless Prize in Fiction) and the novels In Hovering Flight (2008) and Stranger Here Below (2010), the novel in stories The Dime Museum (2025), and of other short stories and essays. She is an emeritus professor of English at Moravian University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and the founder and director of the Moravian Writers’ Conference. Visit her homepage.
