Published in 1999
208 pages
Thisbe Nissen is the author of three novels, Our Lady of the Prairie (2018), Osprey Island (2004), The Good People of New York (2001), and a story collection, Out of the Girls’ Room and into the Night (1999, winner of the John Simmons Short Fiction Award). She is also the co-author with Erin Ergenbright of The Ex-Boyfriend Cookbook, a collection of stories, recipes, and art collages. Her fiction has been published in The Iowa Review, The American Scholar, Seventeen, and The Virginia Quarterly Review, and anthologized in The Iowa Award: The Best Stories 1991-2000 and Best American Mystery Stories. Her nonfiction has appeared in Vogue, Glamour, Preservation and The Believer, and is featured in several essay anthologies.
She has been the recipient of fellowships from the James Michener-Copernicus Society, The University of Iowa, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Yaddo, and the MacDowell Colony, and was the 19th Zale Writer-in-Residence at Tulane University. She has taught at Columbia University, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Brandeis University, The New School’s Eugene Lang College and in the low residency MFA program at Pacific University. These days, she teaches undergrad, MFA and PhD students at Western Michigan University.
What is this book about?
Out of the Girls’ Room and into the Night is a spirited, offbeat collection of stories, elongated riffs on that thing we call …love. All manner of love stories: thwarted love stories, imaginary love stories, love stories offhand and obsessive, philosophical love stories, erudite and amusing love stories.
“People don’t meet because they both like Burmese food,” says one character, “or because someone’s sister has a friend who’s single and new in town, or because Billy’s nose happened to crook just slightly to the left at an angle that made me want to weep…People don’t fall in love with each other …they just fall into love.”
Everyone does it: women of fierce independence, men of thin character, rambling Deadheads, gay teenage girls, despondent Peace Corps volunteers, anorexic Broadway theatre dancers, the eager, the grieving, the uncommunicative. Even the confused do it. And they don’t just fall in love with each other—they fall in love with certain moments and familiar places, with things as ephemeral as gestures and as evanescent as sunlight.
Quirky, real, idealistic, deluded, bohemian, and true, these are people who can—and often do—fall in love with a pair of ears, August afternoons, saucers of vitamins, New Age carpenters, and dead bumblebees. And if there’s something they can teach us, it’s how to conceive of alternative worlds and the terror and the exhilaration of venturing outside the confines of the lives we know and making our way into a dark, glittering unknown.
Several of the stories in Out of the Girls’ Room and into the Night have been published previously. They are:
“A Brownstone, Park Slope,” The North American Review, May/August 1999
“A Bungalow, Koh Tao,” Fourteen Hills, Spring/Summer 1999
“3 1/2 x 5,” Wisconsin Review, Spring 1999
“Mailing Incorrectly,” Reed Magazine, summer 1998
“Apple Pie,” Sycamore Review, Winter/Spring 1998
“Grog,” Spelunker Flophouse, summer 1997
“The Estate,” Hampton Shorts, summer 1997
“At the No. 1 Phoenix Garden,” Story, spring 1997
“Accidental Love,” Seventeen, December 1996
“Fundamentals of Communication(link is external),” available at Atlantic Monthly‘s online magazine
