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160 pp, 1991
$20.00 hardcover 0-87745-346-2
Winner of the 1991 Iowa Short Fiction Award
"These stories describe with humor and illusionless generosity the urgency and volatility of our passions and the baffling constraints of the relationships within which our passions are expressed. They are alert to the embarrassments people seldom confess to, the tendency of emotion to attach itself to totally inappropriate objects, the shameless inconstancy of self-love."—Marilynne Robinson
"Traps . . . is a collection of original, seasoned, short-short pieces about people caught in the everyday traps of destructive friendships, bad marriages, unreliable lovers, dead-end jobs, and impossible ambitions. The characters in these 13 stories have been run over by a few trucks and still survive—some to escape their traps and some to try a little longer. Particularly vivid are the portraits of fragility in middle age. These people are not afraid to be earnest, angry, desperate, exhausted, and even—often quite unreasonably—hopeful. Given the ennui celebrated in so much contemporary prose, this thin book is a kind of miracle. . . . I look forward to my next encounter with her intelligence, skepticism, and generosity."—Village Voice
". . . [A] skillfully crafted collection."—New York Times Book Review
". . . Traps [is] such a fascinating collection. There are no wasted words here; each paragraph shimmers with taut sentences and sparsely rendered visual images."—Belles Lettres
". . . Olsen voices a cool delicious irony in her 13 precisely crafted stories, set in Manhattan and Brooklyn neighborhoods"—Publishers Weekly
Heroines in Sondra Spatt Olsen's compelling stories often find themselves in bad situations: a wife with an irresponsible husband, an older woman who wants to leave her younger lover, a suburban housewife who wants sex with her doctor, a teacher who falls in love with her student, a young girl haunted by her mother's judgments, a demanding career woman unsettled by her boyfriend's success, a young woman who finds that her friends, when drunk, are potential murderers. But just as Chekhov gives us pleasure from moments of pain, Olsen illuminates the universal humor and pathos of bad situations.
Olsen brings bright wit, fresh empathy, and a generous dose of psychological insight to themes of abandonment and humiliation—her fiction offers a sort of transcendence from pain. These haunting, unsparing stories are not afraid to confront life's traps and pitfalls, but they do so with a celebration of the courage that rises amid the confusion all of us face.
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