Babette Fraser Hale
Narcissi
Award-winning author and memoirist, recipient of the Texas Institute of Letters First Fiction Prize
Houston, TX
BOOK COVER
BOOK DETAILS
Pub Date: October 15, 2025
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publisher: Winedale Publishing
Page Count: 280
Format: Paperback and Ebook
13-digit ISBN/Price: Paperback / 9780975272770 / $25.00
Ebook / 9780975272794 / $9.99
Awards:
Sergio Troncoso Award for Best First Book of Fiction (A Wall of Bright Dead Feathers: Stories 2022)
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
TIMELY TIE-INS
July
- Social Wellness Month
- National Love is Kind Day – 27
- Paperback Book Day – 30
August
- Romance Awareness Month
- Book Lovers Day – 9
September
- Read a New Book Month
- Self-Care Awareness Month
- Buy a Book Day – 7
- Publication Date – 15
October
- National Book Month
- National Storytelling Day – 5
- World Mental Health Day – 10
- National Evaluate Your Life Day – 19
November
- National Novel Writing Month
- National Author’s Day – 1
- I Love to Write Day – 15
SUGGESTED INTERVIEW QUESTIONS
- Narcissi is a novel-in-stories. What does that form allow you to do emotionally and structurally that a traditional novel doesn’t?
- The women in the book are drawn to Cole in different ways. What do you think who we’re drawn to reveals about us?
- The idea that “hurt is never the whole story” runs through the book. What lies beyond hurt in these characters’ lives?
- How much did the setting of 1980s Texas impact the story? If it was written in a modern setting, how would it look different?
- What makes Cole so compelling is defined largely by how he listens. In Narcissi, is listening an act of care, or something more complex?
- Movement, geographical and emotional, seems central to the story. Does Cole move because he is searching for something, or escaping something?
- Your characters resist easy moral judgment. How did you approach writing people who are at once capable of care and harm—both understandable and, at times, inexcusable?
- How does Narcissi explore the idea that the traits we admire—drive, ambition, intensity—can become survival mechanisms under pressure?
- You’ve worked across many roles as a writer, editor, and publisher. How have those experiences shaped the way you approached the structure and voice of Narcissi?
BOOK DETAILS
Pub Date: May 17, 2022
Genre: Memoir / Christian Inspirational
Publisher: She Writes Press
Page Count: 304
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 978-1647429003
Price: $15.99
