What makes these eleven short stories unusual is Tallent's keen and original eye for detail; her characters' obsessions read as though grounded firmly in fact.... Even in the fragile moments when words fail her characters -- the moments around which all of these stories pivot -- her meanings surface with the liquid ease of daydreams" (
Saturday Review, 9 June 1983).
Tallent was born on 8 August 1954 in Washington, D.C. Her father, William Hugh Tallent, worked for the government as an agricultural specialist and research chemist; her mother, Joy Redfield Tallent, once a speech therapist, became a full-time homemaker, caring for Elizabeth and her two younger siblings. Although the family moved frequently, they lived in the Midwest throughout her childhood and adolescence, and she earned her B.A. in anthropology at Illinois State University in Normal in 1975. She initially planned to attend graduate school after she was offered a slot in the prestigious anthropology program at the University of New Mexico. With her new husband, Barry Craig Smoots, whom she married in 1975 prior to her graduation, Tallent left Illinois for New Mexico, but she never made it to the university. When the couple came to the fork in the road between Taos and Santa Fe, Tallent told her husband that graduate school was a mistake.
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