“ Southwest Louisiana native Soileau portrays the beauty of her home state as well as the poverty, and her empathy and love for its people are evident. A stunning debut from a writer to watch.”
LAST ONE OUT SHUT OFF THE LIGHTS
STORIES BY STEPHANIE SOILEAU
A debut story collection from a rising star, revealing Louisiana and its characters with stark honesty and empathy as they grapple with homesickness, desperation, and desire.
Last One Out Shut Off the Lights is a vivid and evocative portrait of the last-chance towns of southern Louisiana, where oil development, industrial pollution, dying wetlands, and the ever-present threat of devastating hurricanes have eroded their inhabitants' sense of home. These stories feature characters struggling to find a foothold in a world that is forever washing out from under them, and who must reckon with their ambivalence about belonging to a place so continually in flux. An overwhelmed mother leaves her infant son in a closet to buy herself a night out; a teacher with a terminally ill husband fantasizes about another man; an old man surveys the devastation left by Hurricane Katrina and decides the fate of a lost cat; and a young woman out of options tries to drag her obese brother to Mexico for surgery, desperate to save his life and her own. Stephanie Soileau's writing is a powerful reminder of the rich variety of American southern culture, and brings back into focus the language and customs that still make Louisiana so unique.
PRAISE FOR LAST ONE OUT SHUT OFF THE LIGHTS
“Stephanie Soileau is a natural-born storyteller, and LAST ONE OUT SHUT OFF THE LIGHTS is flooded with heartache and soul and humor and wisdom. As one of her narrators says, Brace yourself now. This is an outstanding and wide-ranging collection, plain and simple.”
“What carries us through these hilarious and heartbreaking stories about outcasts of all stripes is Stephanie Soileau’s remarkable voice — honest, bracing, and always emphatic — as she introduces us to one unforgettable character after another... I loved this beautiful collection about the complication of home and the difficulty of belonging.”
“The ambitions, passions and hurts of her unforgettable characters crackle beneath the blazing lights of the Louisiana oilfields. This collection is an astonishing achievement. I will read every word this writer writes.”
“The way bayous flow in both directions, these stories move from darkness to deep feeling and back again... Like a love child of Lucia Berlin and Walker Percy, this book is a lightning bolt of a literary debut.”
“These quietly moving stories are set in the backwater of the winding down Louisiana oil economy, where the climate crisis is a new destructive force: wetlands are dying and whole towns are becoming unlivable. The characters in Soileau’s struggle to live in a world where home is a tentative thing, searching for purchase elsewhere in their lives. Enchanting and so neatly planed they feel made by time, this book marks the debut of a writer to watch.”
Photo by Katelyn Mallett
About the author
Stephanie’s work has appeared in Best American Short Stories, Granta, Glimmer Train, Oxford American, Ecotone, Tin House, New Stories from the South, and other journals and anthologies, and has been supported by fellowships from the Wallace Stegner Fellowship Program at Stanford University, the Camargo Foundation, the Vermont Studio Center, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She received an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and has taught creative writing at the Art Institute of Chicago, Stanford University, and the University of Southern Maine. Originally from Lake Charles, Louisiana, Stephanie now lives in Chicago, where she is an Assistant Professor of Practice in the Arts at the University of Chicago.