Better Times

Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, the stories in Better Times focus on whats happening in places people dont think to look. Women, sometimes displaced, often lonely, are at the heart of these stories. In Better Times Sara Batkie focuses on the moments in womens lives when the wider world is wrapped up in other matters: a father and daughter, separated by time and an ocean, dreaming of each other; a girl in a home for troubled women imagining the journey of the first dog in space; a phantom breast returning to haunt a woman after her mastectomy; a young woman giving birth to a litter of eggs. Such are the ordinary women weathering extraordinary circumstances in Better Times. Divided into three sections covering the recent past, our current era, and the world to come, the stories gathered herewith characters stymied by loneliness, motherhood, illness, even cataclysmic climate changeinterrogate the idea that so-called better times ever existed, particularly for women.