Book

Advanced praise for Have Mercy On Us

​

“I wish I had written all ten of these brilliant, tender, and beautiful stories. This book deserves prizes.”

– Tim O’Brien, author of The Things They Carried

 

“Everybody in this gorgeous, illuminating collection is cheating, posing, yearning, lost – in other words, human. Lisa Cupolo tells these stories with the merciful, merciless third eye of a truly gifted writer.”

– Danzy Senna, author of Caucasia and New People

 

“What a remarkable book of stories Have Mercy on Us is. With settings that range from small-town Canada to rural Kenya to 1940s Florida, its vibrant plots kept surprising me at every turn. I loved never knowing what these characters were going to do, as the ironies of life unfolded around them.”

– Joan Silber, author of Improvement, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction

​

“Lisa Cupolo has a masterful gift for locating the most vulnerable, make it or break it, moment in a relationship, and then exploring the outcome with great insight and wisdom. The accomplished stories in Have Mercy on Us—skillfully varied in tone and geography—come together thematically to reveal the emotional price of love and loss. Will a young mother choose to leave her family? Will a husband continue to cheat even when confronted? Will an unacknowledged child be accepted into a family? Will a child come home when begged to do so? Some of the shifts are subtle but none are simple and all are memorable and satisfying.”

-Jill McCorkle, author of Hieroglyphics

 

“In her masterful collection, Lisa Cupolo investigates the tender ironies that define our friendships, marriages and love affairs, our fragile dreams, and the very things that make us human. These heart and soul stories shimmer with intelligence and deep insight, written by a remarkable new voice in fiction.”

– Elizabeth Brundage, author of The Vanishing Point

 

“Lisa Cupolo’s vivid, earthy, richly imagined stories paint a landscape of legends and losers, well-knit women and troublesome men, ambivalent mothers and doting fathers—in other words humans at every stage of connection and folly. The mercy in Have Mercy on Us is that Cupolo has conjured a world seen through her wise, unflinching, and big-hearted gaze. And that is grace.”

– Carol Edgarian, author of Vera