Praise for Ex-Boyfriend on Aisle 6

“Don't be fooled by the lovely, lady-like voices that lure you into the nineteen short stories in Susan Jackson Rodgers' Ex-Boyfriend on Aisle 6. It's hard not to be pulled into the deceptively charming female heads and start laughing along, relating to the frazzled divorced woman unhappy to bump into her ex-boyfriend, or the little girl innocently feeding birds outside by the pool. Then a devastating twist towards the end lurches your heart out and shocks you so much you have to go back to reread the beginning to see what the author had slyly slipped past that you'd barely noticed. Think: Flannery O'Connor meets Desperate Housewives. A poetic, hilarious and haunting collection.”

 — Susan Shapiro, author of Overexposed and Five Men Who Broke My Heart

“With uncanny precision, Susan Jackson Rodgers conjures the jittery core of daily experience where every thought and gesture is saturated with our deepest fears and most harrowing memories. We’ve lost everything: a brother has died; a husband has left us; we can’t remember the words of a song, but its rhythms pulse through our bones and its melody haunts us. In this world of quiet grief and fractured perception, we become the improbable link, an electrical charge that ignites a dangerous chain of accidents borne by a surge of desire. The rupture of shared sorrow, the mercy of compassion, brings us to our knees in wonder. A voice from within and without offers the only comfort it can: ‘Help is on the way.’ Yes, hold on, these strange, lovely, elegantly spare, gorgeously unpredictable stories will delight and save you.”

 — Melanie Rae Thon, author of In This Light: New and Selected Stories

“Susan Jackson Rodgers is always right about how life feels. One after another of her extremely different characters—some familiar, some hilariously strange—seems to have been written from within, by an author who remembers behaving just as oddly on some dim occasion, and at the time it even made sense. . .  I couldn’t stop reading these stories.”  

— Alice Mattison, author of When We Argued All Night

“In these stories—hilarious, tragic, full of sorrow, whimsy, love, despair, hope, and beauty—Susan Jackson Rodgers examines the ordinary to extraordinary effect; brings us to the precipice of disaster again and again; then flips our expectations in ways authentic and entirely unpredictable, exposing our mortal wounds, big, small, terrifying, true.”

 — Dinah Lenney, author of Bigger than Life: A Murder, a Memoir

“Susan Rodgers is a wonderful, sure-footed writer who writes beautifully about women in the full, confusing bloom of adulthood.  Here she serves up nineteen alternating bursts of humor and longing--these stories are domestic in the most meaningful sense of the word: about parents and lovers, about homes, and the desperate, vivid, sexy, pragmatic, haunted, and harried lives that go on inside them.”

 — Tony Doerr, author of Memory Wall: Stories

About the Author

Susan Jackson Rodgers grew up in Connecticut and New York City. She earned her B.A. from Bowdoin College, her M.A. from Kansas State University, and her M.F.A. from Bennington College. She is the author of The Trouble With You Is And Other Stories (Mid-List Press, 2004). She lives in Corvallis, Oregon with her husband and three children, and teaches at Oregon State University. Her website is www.susanjacksonrodgers.com.