Published Collections

Maureen’s first collection of short stories hits shelves in a few months, but you can pre-order it at the advance discount rate of $9 directly from the publisher, Main Street Rag.

Stories from the collection have appeared in fine literary journals, including Stone Canoe, the North Carolina Literary Review, and others.

In The Slow Vanishing, Maureen Sherbondy looks at our lives through a lens of fantasy and wisdom, then tells our stories in compelling and magical ways. Thought-provoking, entertaining, troubling, and true, these tales will have you nodding your head in recognition, eager to read more. — Therese Fowler, author of Souvenir

Off-beat stories with unexpected endings. Life’s ordinary problems intruded on by the bizarre. The Slow Vanishing has a mesmerizing, magical effect. — Joanna Catherine Scott, author of The Road from Chapel Hill

The writing is very evocative and interesting to read. I enjoyed each piece tremendously. — Karen Quinn, bestselling author of The Ivy Chronicles

What a wonderful collection this is. Maureen Sherbondy’s The Slow Vanishing is remarkable for its abundance, its variety, its range, and its sheer imagination. There are long, serious stories like “Opossum,” which begins the book, and “Last Respects,” which ends it. There are comic stories, very short stories (flash fictions), and in all of them Sherbondy’s gift for vivid, sharp imagery and telling detail shines forth. Everything seems to vanish—children, mothers, houses, comedians, body parts, husbands, even punctuation—and all this vanishing asks us to think about life without that which has vanished. And we do think. We laugh, we worry, we think, and we read on, because we want more. — Anthony S. Abbott, author of The Three Great Secret Things

Maureen Sherbondy’s new book of short stories, The Slow Vanishing, showcases the work of an unfailingly entertaining writer with a gift for dark humor and lots of tricks up her sleeve, but always in the service of deepening the reader’s understanding of the endless variations of human desperation that often haunt the most conventional of lives. Her adept use of the bizarre descriptive detail and quirky conversational tidbit enables her to create memorable characters that we end up rooting for, often within a very few pages, or even paragraphs, in the case of her shorter pieces, no matter how hapless their lot. These stories crackle with odd energy, and often leave the reader breathless with surprise, horrified and laughing at the same time. — Robert M. Colley, Associate Dean: University College of Syracuse University

Maureen’s second chapbook: It was recently reviewed in The Pilot Newspaper and at NewPages.com. Praying at Coffee Shops was named a winner in the poetry category of the Next Generation Indie Book Awards.

What a thought-provoking collection for a Jewish audience! Moving from the concrete details of Jewish rituals to their spiritual implications, Sherbondy is full of wisdom and surprises- sometimes ironic, often dark, full of yearning for the tikkun olam seamstresses to stitch the broken world back together with their needles and threads. And what a treat, in the midst of the spiritual struggle, to find in the poet’s contemplation of a praying mantis that has landed on her prayer book, one of those rare, transcendent moments when “God’s long fingers are reaching, guiding us toward a promise.” These tough-minded, deceptively lovely poems yield up more of their considerable power with each successive reading. — Ellyn Bache

All in all, Praying at Coffee Shops is marvelously effective poetry, full of little realizations and multiple layers of meaning that the best poetry delights us with. — Roy Wang, NewPages.com Reviewer

This collection combines the appeal of archetype and the charm of wit with a great dose of wisdom. Sherbondy’s characters, a familiar lot of fairytale and beloved heroes and heroines, are navigated through the straits of reality by an ironic and gentle presence. The lessons learned from these poems are not unlike those learned from the fairytales: Snow White still finds that you can’t take anything at face value, but instead of confronting this painful truth through the vehicle of the shiny apple, she ends up at Planned Parenthood because her prince has no health insurance. Sherbondy’s poems are filled with subtle and pleasurable music, complementing the twist of beloved narrative into resonant truths. — Patty Seyburn, author of Diasporadic and Mechanical Cluster

Following the metamorphic tradition of Anne Sexton’s Transformations, the poems in After the Fairy Tale update the hitherto fictively blessed lives of personages (ranging from Snow White and Alice in Wonderland, to Dorothy Gale of Wizard of Oz fame), placing them in our own time in which the mundane is heroically tragic and psychic survival miraculous. Maureen Sherbondy has created emotionally sly and ironically precise poems that show that the magic beanstock is rooted in flat dull earth; the characters who have spent “the better” part of their lives in worlds of mystery and wonder have now returned to reality. That reality is unmistakably our own. — Steven B. Katz, poet, and Pearce Professor of Professional Communication, Clemson University.

There’s a reason we call them fairy tales. Maureen Sherbondy’s poems show Snow White, Cinderella, and others mixed unhappily into modernity. Displaced and disillusioned, our childhood champions yearn for passion, endure the tedium of suburbia, and age awkwardly into nursing homes. Even their dreams don’t satisfy. Fancifully realistic, these poems revisit old friends with humor, pathos, and hard truths for us all. — Kenneth Chamlee, I. B. Seese Distinguished Service Professor of English and Creative Writing, Brevard College