Fifth Woman

Nona Caspers is the author of Little Book of Days (Spuyten Duyvil, 2009) and Heavier Than Air (University of Massachusetts Press, 2008), which was honored with the AWP’s Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction and listed as a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. Her work has been supported by a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a San Francisco Arts Commission grant, a LAMBDA Literary Award nomination, and the Joseph Henry Jackson Literary Award, among other awards. Stories have appeared in numerous literary reviews, including Kenyon Review, Glimmer Train, Cimmaron Review, Black Warrior, and The Sun. She is a professor of creative writing at San Francisco State University and lives in San Francisco.

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"21 Books Queer Women (And Everybody Else) Should Read," Buzzfeed2018 LAMBDA Literary Award Finalist2018 Foreword Indies Book of the Year SILVER Winner in Literary Fiction and Finalist in LGBT Fiction2018 IPPY Awards for LGBT + Fiction Bronze MedalistThe Masters Review, “22 Books We’re Looking Forward to This Year”"Caspers’ writing is spare and deceptively straightforward, lending even her realist portraits the soft edges of a dream. . . . Each vignette is short—some are only a page long—but poignant; as if Lydia Davis’ controlled remove had been sifted through the humor and immediacy of Michelle Tea. But it’s the accumulation of grief that matters here, almost as much as the details of domesticity, a quiet but tender declaration of queer love lost in San Francisco." —Kirkus Reviews"This gem of a collection is a transcendent portrayal of bereavement, showing how death elevates the mundane and affects everything humans do, see, and think."—Publishers Weekly"Read if: You like fragmented novels, like Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad, or Marguerite Duras’s The Lover, or you just love a good book about grief."—"21 Books Queer Women (And Everybody Else) Should Read," Buzzfeed". . mesmerizing, moving. . ."—Brandon Yu, The San Francisco Chronicle"I learned much about craft and tone from reading The Fifth Woman. I found myself constantly plunging into and then climbing out of dark holes. I reveled in rooting into the dark, icy ground, digging my nails into the rocky dirt. And I exulted when I finally surfaced, gulping air and blinking into the clear, bright light. Caspers's brilliance rests in her light yet firm touch: a use of language that is simultaneously tempered yet lush."—"The Whispers I Could Almost Hear," Nancy Au, The Cincinnati Review"In twenty three connected exquisite moments (or stories) the novel constructs a map of loss, its creative potential, its capacity to tear open the world, trouble boundaries, and dust the daily with wonder. In The Fifth Woman, grief is queer-as-in-odd, as in boundary-blurring, as in otherways loving, as in curious. . . . You need a book, like this one, that reminds you of what your own lost love once told you, that everything can be written about, and because it explores so clearly the stage, the smoke, and the mirrors of this two-bit magic trick of existence: a person is here and then they are gone."—Carson Beker, LAMBDA Literary“The mundane becomes poetic in Nona Caspers’s novel-in-vignettes, The Fifth Woman. Its atmosphere of grief is established with tight, beautiful prose. . . . There are no wasted words. The text itself is a pleasure.” —Foreword Review, Starred Review“Precise and glowing prose.”—May-Lee Chai, The Millions"[I]ncredible. . .The Fifth Woman is an ecosystem of grief; a circular cloud of emotion, memory, and experience that bends towards the surreal, exploring, or so it seems, every nook and cranny of the aftermath of the death of a loved one."—Noah Sanders, Empty Mirror"The writing style is lyrical and the story moves through different elements—ants, the girlfriend, the apartment, water, the neighbors—to create a circular, dreamlike remembrance."—Lisa Martin, The Guardsman“The Fifth Woman is stealthily astonishing from its first line to its last. Over the course of twenty-three connected short fictions, the writer marks out a trail of mourning that is both quite straightforward and miraculously layered, strange, and emotionally multifaceted. There is not a single sentence in these stories that is not as clear as water…. It is a wonderful book.”—Stacey D’Erasmo"Grief alters the world in ways that are both expected and less so. The Fifth Woman is a story of love, loss, and carrying on, in language that is always precise and often transporting. There is a sadness here but also acute observation and magical happenings. Nona Caspers is a true original."—Jean L. Thompson, author of Who Do You Love and The Woman Driver"Let me just put it there: This is one of the most beautiful, sorrowful, light-infused love stories I’ve ever read. Some stories you walk around with for good. The Fifth Woman will be one of them. Nona Caspers will change the way you see. Can a reader ask for more?"—Peter Orner