“Winner of this year’s Drue Heinz Literature Prize, this collection of 10 stories heralds the emergence of a powerful new voice. Linked by variously composed definitions of location and sense of place, the stories, while distinguished by their range, share a deeply determined narrative structure….. Sonenberg drives at essential truths from an astonishing variety of approaches…. Comprehending this fluid and graceful writing is ultimately a pleasure….Sonenberg…explores the boundaries within and without which lives are lived, and in doing so, she has succeeded in putting herself on the map.”
Publisher’s Weekly

“This is prose of the highest order: tender, provocative, penetratingly intense, subtle, eloquent. Maya Sonenberg’s singular and powerful voice is also wholly consistent from beginning to end: each line, however unique, seems to spring from a deeply centered source.”
“Cartographies is a truly beautiful story, powerful, intricate, deeply moving. A love affair is evoked entirely within the metaphors of map-making…. Bodies, faces, the emotional distance between lovers, the setting of a table or a mountain to be climbed: all are maps to be pondered and read, just as all maps, so pondered, reveal new stories.
Robert Coover

“This book has the feel of a discovery. Maya Sonenberg writes a compacted, evocative, poet’s prose, and has a sense of form that can surprise even as it satisfies. Sonenberg has an eye all her own. …. Cartographies introduces a writer of significant accomplishment and fine promise.”
Aram Saroyan, Los Angeles Time Book Review

“…Maya Sonenberg’s deeply ambitious volume of stories, Cartographies. Landscape and its relation to land, maps and their static reference to the shifting continents they describe, metaphors and the tricky question of referentiality—these are some of the difficult ideas Sonenberg attempts to work out in the brave and heady collection….It is clear that Sonenberg knows a great deal—about metaphor, loss, and love.”
Brett Singer, The Village Voice Literary Supplement

“The prose here is intense, the stories sculpted…..Stories like “Quarry Games” and “Nature Morte” are handsomely written; they feel like apercus, gem-like instances of insight. Sonenberg is smart and so is her book.”
Frederick Busch, Tribune Books, Chicago Tribune

“These are stories to be read slowly, pensively and aloud.”
Rebecca Warburton Boylan, New York Newsday

“…an ingenious feat of conjuring , reminiscent of the word of Donald Barthelme.”
Mason Buck, The New York Times Book Review

“…quirky charm, the offbeat but accurate way Sonenberg describes the vicissitudes of ordinary life….The prose with which Sonenberg describes such frailties is ripe, lush, melodic. It is exuberantly strewn with colors whose kaleidoscopic effect is brilliant….”
Ketura Persellin, The Boston Phoenix Literary Section

“These stories have the fierce concentration and lyricism of poetry….Sonenberg sees her characters with a poet’s eye, sees behind them, sees beyond them, sees through them and sees them reversed.”
Marcia Tager, New Direction for Women

“Cartographies is not a book to be read lightly. It wants to show us new, untrod territory, recesses of the human condition previously unexplored. This mapmaker brings something new to her art. Color, hear and smell, bend of tree or sparkle of river are no longer left to the imagination of the traveler. This map has been given new relief and new dimension.”
Terri Mategrano, Review of Contemporary Fiction

“Geographical metaphors give this book its solid and sweeping power, and Sonenberg’s dense colorful environments succeed because of her profound understanding of the dynamics of place, her understanding of earth, water and air as forces in constant, heaving flux…. The entire collection bristles with such vigorous and sometimes demanding writing—yet these demands are the result of intense originality. Sonenberg’s unique way of seeing requires, and rewards, a different kind of reading.”
Thom Palmer, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“This ability to see into the heart of things sets Maya Sonenberg apart from writers of traditional fiction, and allows her to both exploit and defy the limits of language.”
Ellen S. Wilson, Carnegie Magazine

“Sonenberg’s writing is at once disquieting and illuminating. It is not for the reader seeking escape, but it is a mirror for the quirks of our souls.”
Price Colman, Rocky Mountain News

This one is out of print. If you’d like a copy, please contact me.