Description
Most of us have a horror of being thought sentimental by our readers, and yet we want to move our readers to feelings of genuine emotion.
In this class, I will explore that line between sentimentality and emotion in fiction. I’ll look at short stories by Alice Munro and George Saunders that come precariously close to sentimentality and explore how they manage to avoid it. We all know the risks of sentimentality, but I argue that there’s an even greater risk to being emotionally reticent on the page.
About Kirstin Valdez Quade
Kirstin Valdez Quade is the author of The Five Wounds, which won the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize and the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award and the Lambda Literary Award. Her story collection, Night at the Fiestas, won the John Leonard Prize from the National Book Critics Circle, the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a “5 Under 35” award from the National Book Foundation. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, The New York Times, and elsewhere. She teaches at Princeton and in September will join the faculty of the Stanford Creative Writing Program.
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