Confessions of a Falling Woman

Publisher Harper Collins, February 2008

The author of the highly acclaimed and bestselling THE MADONNAS OF LENINGRAD returns with a collection of stories by turns tender, comic, and devastating.

Debra Dean, author of the bestselling THE MADONNAS OF LENINGRAD, has been writing award-winning short stories for many years. Now, in this stunning collection, she presents 10 stories that display the depth and magnitude of her skill as a literary talent, half of which have never before been published. New York City neighbors let down their guard for a naive puppeteer. A southern matriarch faces her family at an intervention. A break-in triggers insomniac introspection in a desperate actor. Replete with the seamless storytelling and unique voice that made THE MADONNAS OF LENINGRAD a great success, this collection is sure to satisfy Dean’s growing fanbase as it eagerly awaits her new novel.

THE MADONNAS OF LENINGRAD was a San Francisco Chronicle bestseller, an ALA Notable Book, a #1 Book Sense pick, and a Quill Awards Book of the Year nominee.

Debra Dean worked as an actor in the New York theater for nearly a decade before opting for the more secure life of a writer. She and her husband now live in Miami, where she is teaching at the University of Miami. She is currently at work on her second novel.

Fans of Debra Dean’s fine first novel, The Madonnas of Leningrad, will be delighted by her equally fine first story collection, Confessions of a Falling Woman. Dean is a marvelous chameleon of a writer (“We are all chameleons in my family,” she writes in the opening line of one story), adapting, reflecting, revealing multiple, generous worlds with perceptiveness, humor and light
— Manette Ansay, author of Blue Water and Vinegar Hill