I Meant It Once

A delicate balance of sharp and sweet, I Meant It Once explores longing, belonging and the big emotions that can make us feel small with unusual elegance and depth. Kate Doyle is both a gifted observer of human nature and an original and poetic prose stylist. * Coco Mellors, author of Cleopatra and Frankenstein *Gorgeously written and staggeringly honest, I Meant It Once is a reclamation of female friendship, intellect, rage, desire, and creativity - placing a timeless filter on contemporary questions. It will bewitch you * Tess Gunty, author of The Rabbit Hutch *I Meant it Once signals the arrival of a major talent and voice. These stories are by turns funny, melancholy, wry, and piercing in their insight. More than that, I arrived at the end of each of these stories feeling a little less lonely in a world that seemed a little less dark. Kate Doyle brings a rare confidence to stories about the lonely, the prickly, the aimless, and the out-of-sorts, all told in prose that is lively and beautiful. I loved these stories * Brandon Taylor, author of Booker Prize Finalist Real Life and Story Prize Winner Filthy Animals *Kate Doyle’s sentences are something to be savored, and the characters in these stories live and breathe and stand up fully from the page. Perceptive, funny, forthright, and often alarmingly relatable, I Meant It Once is a tremendously good debut. * Claire Lombardo, New York Times bestselling author of The Most Fun We Ever Had *Kate Doyle’s gorgeous, electric fiction upends expectations about how stories are told and what exactly needs telling. Lovers and rivals, siblings and friends navigate the funny, strange, sometimes explosive, sometimes transcendently beautiful terrain of love and ambition. These are wise, intimate, essential stories. * Mary-Beth Hughes, author of The Ocean House *Crystalline, funny, and richly alive, the stories in I Meant It Once thrilled me with their emotional acuity, their delicately nuanced portrayals of desire and intimacy, and their formal and syntactical dexterity and play. * Lynn Steger Strong, author of Want and Flight *With I Meant It Once, Kate Doyle proves to be an exciting, fresh, intelligent, unique, poetic and wild new talent. More, the stories feel like dispatches from the front of modernity. This is what it feels like to be here, and young, right now. This is a timely, inspired, great book. * Darin Strauss, author of Half a Life *Kate Doyle’s economical and beautiful prose is suffused with a wistful melancholy shot through with wry humor, and we feel her characters’ longing as though it is our own. The details are exact, as are the insights; the stories feel utterly real. The result is intimate and propulsive. An exceptional debut. * Cara Blue Adams, author of You Never Get It Back *

Kate Doyle is the author of the short story collection I Meant It Once, forthcoming from Algonquin Books in July 2023. She has received support for her work from Virginia Center for Creative Arts, A Public Space, Hawthornden, the Adirondack Center for Writing, the NYU Creative Writing Program, and the Global Research Institute at NYU Paris. Originally from New England, she has lived in New York City, Ithaca, and Amsterdam.

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