Bob Thurber

Winner of

The 2006 Meridian Editor’s Fiction Prize

In Bob Thurber’s award-winning CINDERELLA SHE WAS NOT, Raymond, its loathsome narrator, solicits the full-bosomed, randy sister of his moneyed but uncomely wife. Bereft of evident redeeming attributes, the story’s characters paradoxically revel as if liberated by Raymond’s dire maxim: “Life doesn’t care about any of us.”

A familiar motif in many Thurber stories, CINDERELLA SHE WAS NOT evokes a dysfunctional but compelling universe of ordinary mortals deprived of oxygen by jaded circumstances, and where morality glitters like dice ear studs in a collection plate. One can’t help staring at it.