Babette Fraser Hale

ABOUT THE BOOK

Narcissi, a novel in stories, brings us into the world of Cole Burnett, a Texas writer, who needs to keep moving. At first, it’s something in his blood, pressing him, pushing him to write more, achieve more. Later, after the death threat, it becomes a way of staying alive.

Cole is the kind of man who should send women running in the opposite direction. But he has a lanky western charisma and the gift of listening to them, a rare quality in the 1980’s.

The women he encounters have complicated lives–conflicts with husbands, traumas survived, needs postponed, children. They find Cole’s attention compelling, and they all get hurt, or cause hurt, to a greater or lesser degree. But hurt is never the whole story.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Babette Fraser Hale is the author of Narcissi, This Familiar Heart, and A Wall of Bright Dead Feathers, winner of the debut fiction award from the Texas Institute of Letters. Her stories have won the Meyerson Award from Southwest Review and been included among the “Other Distinguished Stories” of the year in Best American Short Stories, 2015. In addition to writing fiction, she has been a magazine feature writer, columnist, contributing editor, book editor and publisher. She lives in Texas. In 2025 she was elected to membership in the Texas Institute of Letters.

TALKING POINTS

• How the novelistic structure of interconnected stories builds a compelling portrait of Cole and those who intersect with him

• The interrelationship of sexual intimacy and emotional pain when friendship is claimed
• How 1980s Texas shapes the emotional and cultural backdrop of the novel
• How the novel explores women with complex inner lives, histories of trauma, and unresolved desires that shape every encounter
• The tension between a man who is both magnetic and morally complicated, and the women who are drawn into his orbit
• What who we’re drawn to can tell us about ourselves
• Why stories are impacted by who is telling them, who is being observed, and what is left out
• How Babette Fraser Hale’s long career in writing, editing, and publishing informs the precision and depth of her fiction