Squandering the Blue

Squandering the Blue is Kate Braverman’s debut story collection, a fierce, hallucinatory vision of Southern California and the women who move through its heat, glamour, and wreckage. Set among artists, addicts, lovers, and drifters, these interconnected stories form a vivid patchwork of lives caught between longing and self-destruction, where affection and addiction are often inseparably entwined.

Across brief, haunting snapshots, Braverman captures women at moments of fracture and transformation: an art-world satire that becomes a feminist post-nuclear parable in “Falling in October”; a woman struggling to break free from an abusive relationship in “Points of Decision”; and, in the widely anthologized “Tall Tales from the Mekong Delta,” a recovering alcoholic navigating motherhood, sobriety, and a dangerously seductive stranger.