Show Don't Tell

Brought to you by Penguin.

Razor-sharp, glittering tales exploring marriage, fame and female friendship, from the Sunday Times and New York Times bestselling author of Romantic Comedy and American Wife.

In this compulsive collection of twelve witty stories, Sittenfeld shows why she’s as beloved for her short fiction as she is for her novels, as she conjures up characters so real that they seem like old friends.

In ‘The Patron Saints of Middle Age,’ a woman visits two friends she hasn’t seen since her divorce. In ‘A for Alone,’ a married artist embarks on a project intended to disprove the so-called Mike Pence Rule, which suggests that women and men can’t spend time alone together without lusting after each other. And in ‘Lost but Not Forgotten,’ Sittenfeld gives readers of her novel Prep a new window into the world of her beloved character Lee Fiora, decades later, when Lee attends an awkward school reunion.

Witty, confronting and full of tenderness, Sittenfeld peels back layer after layer of our inner lives, keeping us riveted to the page with her utterly distinctive voice.

'Messy and delicious' New York Times

'Anything Sittenfeld writes, we'll read' People

'No-one else writes with such precision and amusement' Red Magazine

©2025 Curtis Sittenfeld (P)2025 Penguin Audio

Reseñas de la Crítica

Witty, zeitgeisty short stories, which are full of astute observations and characters so convincing that they feel immediately familiar… Her narrators' voices are funny, warm and informal, making her stories such an easy pleasure to read that they disguise the skill behind Sittenfeld's attentive prose.

Sittenfeld zooms in on urban Midwesterners dealing with middle-aged disillusions in this witty story collection…In one sparkling comedy of manners after another, the author documents with a clear and affectionate eye how tiny prejudices and blind spots lead her protagonists astray. These stories entertain and unsettle in equal measure.

[Sittenfeld's] perfectly contained stories are a joy for their realistically and mundanely fractured characters, moral ambiguities, movingly related moments, and the message that even the smallest tale offers lessons to uncover.

Curtis Sittenfeld is one of America’s best working novelists . . . expect her usual, startlingly intelligent treatment of emotions and relationships

Curtis Sittenfeld’s fiction is perennially inhale-able: smart, barbed, and wickedly funny. I can’t wait to read her latest collection. I look forward to being delighted and destabilized

I love short stories and I love Curtis Sittenfeld and thankfully, Show Don’t Tell was everything I hoped it would be… clever, wry and deeply satisfying

Good as Curtis Sittenfeld’s novels are (among them Prep, American Wife, Romantic Comedy), fans of hers had reason to think, upon the arrival of her first collection in 2019, that her short stories were even better. These were topical, witty, and subversively sexy stories about jealousy, desire, and domestic and professional turmoil. And now comes her latest collection, Show Don’t Tell, a hugely entertaining and formidably intelligent tour through the psyche of mostly middle-aged mothers (and a few fathers), moderately content and successful and still yearning for more. Sittenfeld’s prose has astonishing ease, and her fleet, brisk dialogue sparkles with humor and mischief

Reading Curtis Sittenfeld is like eavesdropping on a conversation between long-standing friends.

Sittenfeld’s observations in her writing are always clever, and this new collection of short fiction includes a tale about the main character in Prep, who visits her boarding school decades later for an alumni reunion

[Sittenfeld] tackles the short story with emotional heft, holding up a mirror to the way we live our lives