Kim Chinquee’s Pipette follows Elle, an active woman in her 50s, as she navigates single living and personal relationships, both introspectively and outwardly. With the rapid onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Elle feels the necessity of maintaining these relationships on top of the desire to regain some sort of normalcy. She enjoys regular biking, writing, teaching, and spending time with her dogs, and takes solace in returning to what she knows.
Eventually, she is motivated by her past experiences, eager to aid in the COVID response, and finds fulfillment pipetting and preparing COVID samples for testing. Through flash-fiction style chapters woven together and infused with colorful imagery, the reader is given the opportunity to connect on a basic human level with the narrator, her surroundings and her life, and find honesty in them as she does.
Some of the scenes are simple, such as “Swat Team” or “Hide Under the Bed,” while others are longer and more complex, yet all of them share the same tone of the mundane warmly becoming the familiar, of humanity, of commonality.
The reader gets a front row seat to another’s journey on a more intimate basis than limited diary entries; in effect, the reader is a part of the story itself—a reader for a writer—in the room with her as she writes and narrates. Because the reader is afforded this outlook, we also get to experience society and its current events through her eyes and her reactions to the “nothing” and the “everything” happening all at once. It is intriguing to observe another’s unique yet recognizable perspective, and the flash fiction style adds to this uniqueness and helps drive the story forward.
The effects of COVID, including the surrounding political aspects, unrest, and social reform were, and still are, felt globally. These aspects are mentioned in the novel, as they must be due to prevalence, but they are not the focus. Instead, the narrator seems to avoid speaking too much about them, in favor of relief, or hobbies, the kind of mild escapism that many of us so often prefer.
“Quarantine Time,” mirrored in this novel, feels as if it is passing slower, day by day, hours bleeding together, but still it passes—we eventually go back to work, re-open shops and hair salons; we continued adopting dogs and applying for jobs, losing friends and making new ones, moving in and out of spaces, new and old. Elle hints at the unfortunate reality that negative effects don’t seem to disappear, only to take a different form. The narrator knows she is “not ready to be anybody’s ghost yet,” willing to continue on, under new “rules and regulations” in this new form, however she can.
I would recommend this book to someone looking for a brief, meaningful read. Well written and pensive, this novel shows us there can be beauty in the passage of time, in loving and taking time to care for others, yes, but especially oneself, in the face of adversity. Little moments can make us who we are, and joy and love can definitely be found in the little things, like taking time to watch the clouds. This novel reminds us that we must learn “how to be” if we are to make peace with any difficulties and respond to our environment.
“Being in awe of the enormous sky I can see clear out my window. The pandemonium it makes when a storm breaks. […] Being silly with myself. Playing imaginary golf while playing an imaginary trumpet, eating imaginary (or real) blueberry sherbet in my fluffy velvet robe. Oh, how scrumptious! My place smells so delicious! Can you study my serology? Can you tell that I am free now?”
—INDEPENDENT BOOK REVIEW
“Pipette by Kim Chinquee is a fast-paced, intelligently crafted tale that follows a young woman as she struggles to get a foothold after moving out of her boyfriend's home. She has moved away from his threatening behavior, which she has, hitherto, ignored by playing nice. She is a writer and an English professor who has to accept a temporary job as a lab technician. Here she excels in her pipetting abilities. With the Covid-19 pandemic tearing the country apart, the protagonist explores activities that allow her to reinvent herself — swimming, biking, running, skiing, and the company of her dogs — while exploring past -trauma and relationships.
Fans of flash fiction will adore Kim Chinquee's Pipette, a novel rooted in humanity and brimming with realism, a tale of resilience and a woman's journey toward recreating herself from the broken pieces of her humanity. The setting against the backdrop of the pandemic is vividly drawn and the protagonist's activities reflect this reality, like remote teaching and the persistent sense of solitude that permeates the writing. Readers who have suffered trauma and been hurt in their relationships will instantly connect with the narrator. The engrossing first-person narrative voice casts a spell on readers and makes it hard to put this book down. I loved the timely paragraph breaks, the short chapters, and the dazzling prose, enriched by cleverly crafted streams of consciousness.”
—Davie Reyes, THE BOOK COMMENTARY (5 out of 5 Stars)
“A 52 year old woman deals with life and its disappointments.
She’s ex-military, a divorcee, middle-aged. She visits hypnotherapists. She’s vegan. She’s a liberal. She goes on retreats. She keeps herself fit. She moved in with Henry who she met on Facebook. They had a lot of mutual athletic friends. That was years ago. Most of the time they get on fine. “I buy his groceries,” she says, “We wake up. We love each other. We watch movies. We drink coffee. We fuck. I get on his nerves sometimes.” Sometimes they break up. Sometimes Henry kicks her out. They get back together. She moves back in. This time she thinks that Henry might be looking for somebody new on the social media running app they both use. She thinks the next time they argue might be the last. And then she has moved out again. And this time it is for good.
Kim Chinquee’s PIPETTE is the story of a few months in the life of an early 50s woman told in snapshots. Short chapters, some no more than a few lines long, each given a title. Some descriptive. Some more abstract. Reading Glasses. Hide Under The Bed. More Like A Meander. Each chapter reads like a very short story. Then the stories build on each other. It’s a narrative stitched from urgent paragraphs of flash fiction, the protagonist gradually revealing herself. The disturbing incidents of her past and the dashed or fragile hopes for her future. The stoicism in the face of actions outside of her control. There’s truth embedded within the words. An unflinching honesty that can catch the reader by surprise. And though much of PIPETTE is seemingly full of good humor and casual wit there seems to be a shadow of sadness cast over the protagonist.
Chinquee’s novella is a bold exercise in form--urgent and experimental yet easy to understand and eminently enjoyable. There is a simplicity to her prose, much of it is pared back and precise. It takes some skill to write so sparingly and requires a self-confidence born from experience and commitment to the craft of writing. Chinquee is a clever writer who is always in control of her material. It’s no surprise that her previous work has been nominated for numerous prizes and published in a variety of well-respected literary journals.
IR Verdict: Kim Chinquee’s PIPETTE is an inventive and intelligent novella with writing so spare and carefully considered that not a word is wasted. A gem of a book."
—IndieReader
“A woman confronts her personal demons against the backdrop of the Covid-19 pandemic in Chinquee’s novel in flash fiction.
Elle appreciates order. She’s an Air Force vet with an adult son (who is currently serving in the military himself) and lives in Buffalo with her partner, the fitness-obsessed Henry, and their four dogs. She teaches fiction writing at a local college. She jogs. She tries to learn to ski, though she finds it exhausting and terrifying. In therapy, she explores her relationship with her late father and the ways his schizophrenia affected their relationship. She also consults her spirit guide—whom she imagines as a man in a beret—who helps her reconnect with her memories of childhood. Henry’s emerging Trumpism proves a strain on the relationship—one that gets even worse when he loses his job at the car dealership. Henry kicks Elle out of the house they share, and immediately after she moves into a new neighborhood, Covid hits. In this new life of isolation, Elle adjusts her priorities. “The mattress in the guestroom is comfy, and the frame is broken, so the mattress just sits on the floor…Sometimes I fall asleep to the TV. Some nights I get up and go to the master bedroom, which is clean and organized. Most nights I fall asleep in one bed, wake in the night and move to the other.” As the pandemic wears on, she confronts her troubled relationships with the now-dead men in her family—her father, her uncle, her paternal grandfather—as well as her attachment to dogs and her compulsion to stay in shape. But will greater self-understanding require her to relax her grip on the ordered life she’s long struggled to build?
Chinquee’s measured prose breaks over the reader like shallow, slow-moving waves. Here, she jogs in the early days of the pandemic: “The park is pretty bare now. I miss the bustle of bikers, children, people on the golf course. There’s a zoo on one portion of the park and I see some cars there. The zoo is closed. I breathe and take my steps. I opt for another loop. My legs feel heavy. My heart feels heavy. My lungs are pretty healthy.” The novel unfolds as a series of flash fiction stories, most less than a page long, each with its own title. The reading experience is not so different than that of an autofiction novel—The Department of Speculation (2014) by Jenny Offill and The End of the Story (1995) by Lydia Davis come to mind. The narrative unfolds slowly through the accumulation of trivial details: the positions of the dogs on the couch, the exercises Henry is doing, the meals Elle makes with her Vitamix. Chinquee’s moves are oblique, and they often take Elle and the reader away from the most engaging material in favor of the mundane. In doing so, however, the novel replicates a bit of what it’s like to repress or avoid or deny one’s personal issues, sprinting (or biking or skiing) ever forward in the hopes our problems can be outrun.
A quiet, fragmentary novel about the chaos roiling beneath life’s surface.”
-Kirkus Reviews
"At turns unsettling and inspirational, PIPETTE tracks the lengths one woman must go to keep herself healthy, sane, and safe. When the narrator moves out of her boyfriend’s home because of threatening behavior, she must grapple with not only rebuilding a home for herself but also with the resurfacing of troubling memories from her past, memories of playing nice to stay safe. As the COVID-19 pandemic advances, the narrator, a writer and English professor, takes a temporary job as a lab technician analyzing test results, finding satisfaction and even pleasure in the precision of her pipetting skills. A tool used to transfer measured liquids safely and accurately, the pipette might also serve as metaphor for how the narrator calibrates her daily activities, parceling the day into writing, self-care, and grueling exercise routines, ever pushing the limits of her body. “I study variations of my heart rate,” she says. The pipette is also an apt metaphor for Chinquee’s prose—sharp, precise chapters, each with the compression and satisfaction of a flash fiction. A moving novel of crystalline structure."
-Eva Heisler, author of READING EMILY DICKINSON IN ICELANDIC
“This extraordinary novel tells the story of a woman’s ordinary days, lived under the twin shadows of war and the Covid-19 pandemic. In elegantly compressed prose, each short chapter opens a window onto an event or encounter. Sometimes we barely glimpse these moments, seen as if from a passing train. Sometimes the window widens into a door and we’re invited inside: kitchen, bedroom, night streets, park. The narrator meditates on time passing, on life and death and meaning, all while focused on the details of each day. Here she is, massaging kale for salad. Here she is, missing her puppy during a workout. Here she is, in bed with a man who kisses her softly, then leaves the next day. Here she is, buying scrubs for a job at a Covid testing center, which brings back memories of time in the military, of faraway family, of the sickness that hovers everywhere at once. What a gorgeous book, full of believable and urgent details that capture this moment with wisdom and precision. Understated and generous, Kim Chinquee’s beautiful debut novel is a delight to read.”
—Carol Guess, author of Girl Zoo and Sleep Tight Satellite
“Pipette is Kim Chinquee’s novel of a fifty-something single woman navigating the life challenges of relationships, career and family history in the age of COVID.Chinquee, a rock star in the flash fiction world, has published several award-winning collections of flash fiction. The chapters in this novel are flash-like in length and they propel the reader through the story, like scrolling through a TikTok feed. It’s hard to put down.Her prose is spare and clean and the narrative voice is dispassionate, which only makes the story more dramatic, more powerful, more heartbreaking, and ultimately more uplifting. It is the story of a woman who does not let her fears control her life. It is a story of courage and triumph. Highly recommended.”
Len Joy—author of Dry Heat and Casualties and Survivors
”What makes a life and gives it meaning? In Pipette, Kim Chinquee explores this question through a hypnotic examination of daily rituals: how we care for the body, the self, and others; our behaviors as friends, lovers, and consumers. Like a lid of ice over a lake, these everyday acts support us through triumph and tragedy. But when the Covid pandemic shatters the world and its surfaces, Chinquee shows the reader in deft and compelling language that sometimes diving far into the depths is the only path to survival.”
—Emma Bolden, Author of The Tiger and the Cage
"In her new book, Pipette, Kim Chinquee deftly explores the possible ranges of meaning that can grow out of the declarative. Frequently, we are invited to examine her speaker caught in her own rut, drawn in the prosaic domestic. But these pieces are more than mere portraiture; instead, they are expert studies in the range of significance that arises from a single moment, no matter its seeming insignificance. This an author who knows how to take nothing for granted!"
—Kyle McCord, Author of Reunion of the Good Weather Suicide Cult
“If the pandemic has prompted us to contemplate the thresholds between chapters of our lives, then there is no better book for the moment than Kim Chinquee’s Snowdog. The evocative vignettes of this flash fiction collection—delightfully spare in their prose, yet generous in renderings of characters and places and the frictions between them—allow us to drift away from our ordinary, into moments of intense connection. This is a book for readers with dogs in their lives, and for those without, a companion at a moment when we all need a new way to stay warm.”
—Mary Biddinger, author of Partial Genius
"In SNOWDOG, Kim Chinquee scratches at the surface of the mundane to reveal the shimmering undercoat of the everyday. Beneath Chinquee’s simple prose is a network of charged observations about sex, relationships, family dynamics, and of course, dogs. The women of these flash fictions are independent, determined, and sometimes struggling: "I move a lot. I know what I want,” says one when she explains her habit of changing therapists. As overlapping protagonists juggle their conflicting desires for independence and companionship, their dogs remain constant and reliable vehicles for humor and reflection in this incisive and surprising book."
-Rochelle Hurt--author of IN WHICH I PLAY THE RUNAWAY and THE RUSTED CITY
At once fiction and nonfiction, the miniature stories in SNOWDOG interlink to form a family album. In delicate, minimalist prose Kim Chinquee captures moments of piercing intensity between a human family and the dogs they live with. The aesthetic choice she makes again and again: Don’t flinch. Don’t look away. Not from a dog fight, not from lovers’ private words for sex, not from a painful exchange between a childless couple, not from the most vulnerable moment in a mother’s dreams. Shaped around a fictional character who is also her namesake, the protagonist in SNOWDOG turns to dogs for comfort as past and present blur. These stories accumulate like snow to form something quiet, solid, and altogether beautiful.
--Carol Guess, author of GIRL ZOO and WITH ANIMAL
Turn fifty. Name your dog Hazel. Order a fish sandwich. A dog that smells like peppermint. Imagine a queen. Watch the body deteriorate as if it's not your body. Repair what can almost be repaired. In these stories, Kim Chinquee evokes what it is to be in a place and then to continue on in that place, though not forever. The logic of damage is that harm is presented as an act of care. In these stories, this logic reverses itself, though not always, and not for everyone. "I'm not sure what she needs," says the narrator, "but I know she needs something." In the end, what that might be, and perhaps that's enough, is a dog "with breath like magic." Be tender. Accept love in all its forms, animal to human, when and as it comes. -- Bhanu Kapil
A compelling and understated exploration of the American domestic, Snowdog captures the reader through the apparent simplicity of daily living. Building meaning and gaining momentum through repetition of scene and image, Chinquee delivers a book that shows how we understand ourselves into existence.
-EJ Colen, author of What Weaponry and The Green Condition
"To read Kim Chinquee’s work is to be startled, touched and affected. She is an American master of this flash form. As she works in small tight spaces; she packs in a world of family, friends, and guys, food, sex, weather, and always the sure and abiding love of dogs. And she's funny, spit-take funny."
--Pia Ehrhardt, author of FAMOUS FATHERS and NOW WE ARE SIXTY
"Kim Chinquee writes tenderly about tough women--soldiers, cops, survivors of violence--and brings a fierce empathy and lyricism to these stories of hardscrabble lives. Shot Girls is a remarkable collection; Chinquee is an important and necessary writer for these times." --Dan Chaon, author of Ill Will and Stay Awake
"Kim Chinquee is an American original. In Shot Girls, she adds to her already sterling body of work, using spare but sublime prose to tell gripping stories that reveal much about life, love and our common humanity." -Ben Bradlee, Jr, author of The Kid: the Immortal Life of Ted Williams and The Forgotten: How the Abandoned People of One Pennsylvania County Elected Donald Trump and Changed America.
"The girls and women breathing through Chinquee’s pages grapple with the casual cruelty of lovers, parents, and a soul-shattering culture. Hands may be calloused and hearts broken, but pervading every bracing, beautifully crafted sentence is a quiet, insistent strength. These are women you know (maybe yourself) and Shot Girls is an unsentimental declaration: Here I am. See me."--Dawn Raffel, author of The Secret Life of Objects and Carrying the Body
"Kim Chinquee is a master storyteller. She brilliantly balances short-short and longer stories. Shot Girls is a sensory delight." --Brandon Hobson, author of Where the Dead Sit Talking
"Beautifully honed stories about lives on the verge of free fall. Shot Girls is merciless in its frank depiction of the way our messy lives careen off one another, bruising everyone they touch. These are the stories that Raymond Carver might have written if he'd grown up female, was from the midwest, joined the military, and lived into the 21st century." --Brian Evenson, A Collapse of Horses and What We Talk About When We Talk About Love: Bookmarked
"Kim Chinquee’s stories are raw, bold, and shocking, and her characters seem like a lost generation cut loose from the values and verities of their midwestern forbears. But her clear-eyed style and calm voice compel our empathy and understanding. One of her lines, “Lightning and thunder busted the sky wide open,” could well describe how these hard-edged stories work. The stories are masterful and original. The title story rips you right through the heart and gut." --Bobbie Ann Mason, author of In Country and The Girl in the Blue Beret
"These bold stories delve into farm work, bloodwork, bar life, military service, sex, love, the possibility of men and the agility of women. Chinquee's wit and speed and clarity is thrilling." --Pia Ehrhardt, author of Famous Fathers & Other Stories
"Kim Chinquee’s Shot Girls flings you into the jittery lives of women and menacing men, of women on the brink of disaster or anomic drift, the stink of smoke and drink, of bad or so-so sex wafting all around. Alternating between lapidary flashes and short fictions that read like novels, Shot Girls is a sledgehammer strike against patriarchy, Chinquee’s deftly drawn dreamers and schemers, drifters and grifters, and gone nuclear families are living, loving, and lying in American pre-fab, its sordid bars and motels, empty parking lots, imposing offices, cold hospitals, and strangling military strongholds. Keenly observed and deeply affecting, Shot Girls is a marvelous haunting, its author a master of loneliness, beauty, desire, sadness, loss."--John Madera, The Big Other
"It’s always a thrill to read the evolving work of Kim Chinquee. In Shot Girls, she often writes in longer forms, but retains all of her characteristic boldness, wit, and commitment to idiosyncratic logic. This book is a treasure.” --Paul Lisicky, author of The Narrow Door: a Memoir of Friendship
"I have admired Kim Chinquee’s work ever since a friend handed me a copy of her vibrant Oh Baby. Since then, my admiration for her writing has grown exponentially. I have handed her books to family members, friends, and students, because I believe in her vision. In her prose poems and flash fiction, Kim Chinquee pulls off in two pages what most writers struggle to accomplish in twenty. A ferocious and compelling world erupts in the reader’s imagination in a Kim Chinquee story, due to the velocity and precision of her language, and in a short span you can feel your mind and heart changing in the best possible ways."--Greg Ames, author of Buffalo Lockjaw and Funeral Platter
"Tiny stories written like jewels, long stories with endings that snap into place." --Terese Svoboda, author of Anything That Burns You and Bohemian Girl
"Stories full of danger and electric writing. Searing. Brilliant."--Susan Henderson, author of Up From The Blue and The Flicker of Old Dreams
"Kim Chinquee has the dead-eye aim and the precision with language that makes her stories hit the mark again and again. They explore the jangling nervous system beneath the ordinary surface of the world, and all the irony, shock, sadness, and hope contained therein. Pitch-perfect writing broadcast on a very real, and wonderful, frequency." --Jean Thompson, National Book Award finalist author of Who Do You Love
"In her new book of very short stories, Kim Chinquee works the flash fiction form in much the same way that Raymond Carver worked somewhat longer story forms: with a stunningly complex simplicity. There is always a roiling subtext beneath the seemingly placid surfaces and tones of Chinquee's stories, a dichotomy which speaks to deep truths about the human condition. Kim Chinquee is a true artist with a true vision, and Pretty is a brilliant book." --Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer-Prize winning author of A Good Scent From A Strange Mountain
"These brief snapshots of conversations in specific settings manage to seem not like fragments of lost wholes but like vivid distillations of essential dramas, each a variation on the shared subject of thwarted intimacy. Though each snapshot is complete in itself, the book gathers mass and momentum, and so achieves a singular power." —Carl Dennis, Pulitzer-Prize winning author of Practical Gods
"Chinquee writes with such precision it stuns how much she gets into a small space. OH BABY will break your heart in one hundred ways, just like that 800-page gorilla you didn't read last week." --Frederick Barthelme, author of sixteen books of fiction and nonfiction including Double Down, and There Must Be Some Mistake
"Kim Chinquee writes with remarkable heart and grace. Her wise capsulizings of love's devastations and of life's roil and disappointments come at you with a sorrowing precision that comforts even as it haunts." --Gary Lutz, author of Stories in the Worst Way and I Looked Alive
"One of the most thrilling things about reading Kim Chinquee's beautifully tiny stories is the great leaps that she takes between sentences--making the reader leap with her into a world of brief glimpses and bits of dialogue that are full of narrative implications, a world of perfectly chosen details that render the understated emotion of a character's whole life." --Michael Kimball, author of The. Way the Family Got Away and Dear Everybody
"In her new collection of prose poems/flash fictions, Pretty, Kim Chinquee peels back the surface layers of human experience, giving her readers poignant glimpses of a girl struggling with identity, longing, and unrequited love. But these are not the fanciful farces we were fed as young girls; the lessons Chinquee's character Elle learns as she grows from a young girl to maturity are raw, candid, and unapologetic....her stories leave us with questions such as: What constitutes truth? How do the roles we play influence others? In what ways do we sabotage ourselves? And that's what good writing should do—leave us wondering, experiencing, and discovering again and again." --Julie Colombo, Rain Taxi
"...the book as a whole moves toward becoming a major work of art. If the individual flashes don't always come to more then a premonition, together they can take on a haunting wholeness—call it a gestalt. This is something I found lacking in another collection I read recently, Elizabeth Strout's Pulitzer-winning Olive Kitteredge (2008), a novel in stories, Strout's prose, like Moore's, is richly textured, and her novelistic approach to stories is expansive: yet, in terms of their protagonists, neither of their books is more various, or deeper, than Chinquee's Pretty. In fact, I dare say they are less so. Strout or Moore may tell you everything you want to know about a character, but also more than you want to know; Chinquee tells you less, and leaves you desiring." —Robert Shapard, American Book Review
"Once asked why he kept making small films in terms of characters and length—chamber pieces for lack of a better word—Ingmar Bergman quoted Frederic Chopin's answer to a woman who asked why he concentrated more on sonatas and concertos instead of that grand, opulent form—the symphony: 'My kingdom is a small one, but I am its king.' People have voiced similar concerns about flash fiction or very short fiction or any of the other diminutives for the form that currently saturates the internet. In the spirit of her Northern European brothers I offer Kim Chinquee as the answer—the queen of flash fiction—and her most recent collection, Pretty. In curt sentences detailing many unsettled lives, Chinquee constructs a mosaic of despair in modern day America." --Greg Gerke, The Rumpus