In eleven original, surprising and deliciously dark stories, Victoria Redel moves effortlessly between men’s and women’s perspectives in stories that explore marriage, divorce and parenthood. A newly divorced mother stumbles her way back into single life. A young man and his girlfriend clean out his dead mother’s overstuffed home. A woman struggles to hide her affair from a doting husband and inquisitive daughter. A man descends into a drug-fueled dream as he imagines losing his pregnant wife to a historical, nineteenth century figure. Redel indelibly captures the ways we love, the ways we yearn and the ways we sabotage each. Throughout the collection, children struggle to make sense of the adult world’s uncertainties as husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, find themselves pressed up against their own limits, “the exaltations and treasons of one’s own mothy heart.” Redel has again done what Grace Paley said of Redel’s first collection, “Only a poet could have written this prose. Only a storyteller could keep a reader turning these pages so greedily.”
Director/Editor/Cinematographer
Justin Duval
Produced by
Film 14
Music by
Jon Logan
REVIEWS



Victoria Redel
Redel is the author of three books of poetry and three books of fiction with a new collection of stories forthcoming in fall 2013. Her latest novel The Border of Truth (Counterpoint 2007) weaves the situation of refugees and a daughter’s awakening to the history and secrets of her father’s survival and loss. Loverboy (2001, Graywolf /2002, Harcourt), was awarded the 2001 S. Mariella Gable Novel Award and the 2002 Forward Silver Literary Fiction Prize and was chosen in 2001 as a Los Angeles Times Best Book. Loverboy was adapted for a feature film directed by Kevin Bacon. Swoon (2003, University of Chicago Press), was a finalist for the James Laughlin Award. Her work has been widely anthologized and translated into six languages. Redel’s fiction, poetry and essays have appeared in numerous magazines and journals including Granta.com. Harvard Review, The Quarterly, The Literarian, The New York Times, The L.A. Times, O the Oprah magazine, Elle, Bomb, More and NOON. For more visit: www.victoriaredel.com
Make Me Do Things
In eleven original, surprising and deliciously dark stories, Victoria Redel moves effortlessly between men’s and women’s perspectives in stories that explore marriage, divorce and parenthood. A newly divorced mother stumbles her way back into single life. A young man and his girlfriend clean out his dead mother’s overstuffed home. A woman struggles to hide her affair from a doting husband and inquisitive daughter. A man descends into a drug-fueled dream as he imagines losing his pregnant wife to a historical, nineteenth century figure. Redel indelibly captures the ways we love, the ways we yearn and the ways we sabotage each.
Director/Editor/Cinematographer
Justin Duval
Produced by
Film 14
Music by
Jon Logan