Informed by the author’s experience in and between genders, this debut story collection blurs fantasy and reality, excavating new meanings from our varied dysphorias. Misfit mothers, prodigal "undaughters," con artists, and middle-aged runaways populate these ten short stories that blur the lives we wish for with the ones we actually lead. A tornado survivor grapples with a new identity, a trans teen psychic can read only indecisive minds, and a woman informs her family of her plans to upload her consciousness and abandon her body. Luke Dani Blue invites the reader into a world of outlier lives made central and magical thinking made real. Surreal, darkly humorous, and always deeply felt, Pretend It’s My Body is bound together by the act of searching—for a spark of recognition and a story of one's own.
In her debut collection of stories, Pretend We Live Here, Genevieve Hudson explores the idea of home and what it means to find one: in the body, in the world, in other people. Her characters are seekers, whose actions are influenced by their slippery identities and by the strange landscapes that surround them. In "Boy Box," a young woman yearns to test her luck with a wild punk girl crush. In "God Hospital," a character journeys deep into the woods of Alabama in search of an infamous religious healer, hoping he can fix her teeth. In "Adorno," someone in need of forgiveness crosses paths with a band of radical vegan activists and gets subsumed into their world. In "Dance!," a recluse writes a breakthrough song for her pink dolphin, but the song's success only drives her further away from society. Set in Amsterdam, the Pacific Northwest, and the Deep South, these stories hum with sexual tension, queerness, displacement, longing, humor, and dark nostalgia. "A terrific collection of stories. There are echoes here of Flannery O'Connor, Barry Hannah, and Denis Johnson, but Genevieve Hudson is her own writer--impressively and gloriously so. Her eye for the clinching detail is unnerving and her sympathies are fascinatingly conflicted. I hope, and suspect, this book will be the start of a long and inspiring career." -Tom Bissell, author of The Disaster Artist and Magic Hours "In Pretend We Live Here, characters bleed and breathe with a caustic energy that dares the reader to keep pace as they are taken from the Deep South to Western Europe and back again. Genevieve Hudson is a new, coming-of-age voice that spotlights rural America, injecting it with a queer freshness that makes her writing impossible to forget." -Jing-Jing Lee, author of How We Disappeared Genevieve Hudson is also the author of A Little in Love with Everyone (Fiction Advocate, 2018), a book on Alison Bechdel's Fun Home. Her writing has been published in Catapult, Hobart, Tin House online, Joyland, Vol.1 Brooklyn, Split Lip, The Collagist, No Tokens, Bitch, The Rumpus, and other places. Her work has been supported by the Fulbright Program and artist residencies at the Dickinson House, Caldera Arts, and the Vermont Studio Center. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from Portland State University, where she occasionally teaches Fiction Writing and Gender Studies courses. She lives in Amsterdam.
The #1 New York Times bestselling (mostly true) memoir from the hilarious author of Furiously Happy. “Gaspingly funny and wonderfully inappropriate.”—O, The Oprah Magazine When Jenny Lawson was little, all she ever wanted was to fit in. That dream was cut short by her fantastically unbalanced father and a morbidly eccentric childhood. It did, however, open up an opportunity for Lawson to find the humor in the strange shame-spiral that is her life, and we are all the better for it. In the irreverent Let’s Pretend This Never Happened, Lawson’s long-suffering husband and sweet daughter help her uncover the surprising discovery that the most terribly human moments—the ones we want to pretend never happened—are the very same moments that make us the people we are today. For every intellectual misfit who thought they were the only ones to think the things that Lawson dares to say out loud, this is a poignant and hysterical look at the dark, disturbing, yet wonderful moments of our lives. Readers Guide Inside
Adams offers up this "Dilbert" collection exploring themes of sloth and corporate indifference. Dilbert, Dogbert, and the rest tackle corporate indolence, avarice, and pretense one strip at a time, from the neighboring cubicle whistler to the guy who's always just too busy to lend a hand.
What happens when a young woman is accidentally caught up in a dangerous murder investigation, having merely been in the wrong place at the wrong time? Lacey Farrell, a rising star on the Manhattan real estate scene, is witness to a murder - and to the final words of the victim. The dying woman is convinced her attacker was after her dead daughter's journal, which Lacey gives to the police, but not before making a copy for herself. It's an impulse that later proves nearly fatal. Placed in the witness protection programme and sent to live in Minneapolis, Lacey must assume a fake identity, at least until the killer can be brought to trial. There she meets Tom Lynch, a radio talk-show host whom she tentatively begins to date - until the strain of her deception makes her break it off. Then she discovers the killer has traced her whereabouts. Armed with nothing more than her own courage and clues from the journal, Lacey heads back to New York determined to uncover who is behind the deaths of the two women… before she is the next casualty. A terrifyingly chilling bestseller from the internationally adored author of DADDY'S LITTLE GIRL
Jen Beagin’s funny, moving, fearless debut novel introduces an unforgettable character, Mona—almost 24, cleaning houses to get by, emotionally adrift. Handing out clean needles to drug addicts, she falls for a recipient who proceeds to break her heart in unimaginable ways. She decamps to Taos, New Mexico, for a fresh start, where she finds a community of seekers and cast-offs. But they all have one or two things to teach her—the pajama-wearing, blissed-out New Agers, the slightly creepy client with peculiar tastes in controlled substances, the psychic who might really be psychic. Always just under the surface are her memories of growing up in a chaotic, destructive family from which she’s trying to disentangle herself. The story of her journey toward a comfortable place in the world and a measure of self-acceptance is psychologically acute, often surprising, and entirely human.
An Oprah Magazine Editors' Pick and Publishers Weekly Best of the Season It’s the summer of 1982 in Blacksburg, Virginia—seven years after the suspicious death of a son and sibling—and the Sobel family is hungry. Francie dresses in tennis skirts and ankle socks and weighs her grams of allotted carrots and iceberg lettuce. Her semi-estranged husband Tate prefers a packed fridge and hidden doughnuts. Daughters Enid, ten, and Vivvy, almost thirteen, are subtler versions of their parents, measuring their summer vacation by meals had or meals skipped. But at summer’s end, secrets both old and new emerge and Francie disappears, leaving the family teetering on the brink. Told from alternating points of view by the four living Sobels, Pretend We Are Lovely is a sharp and darkly funny story of forgiveness, family secrets, and the losses we inherit. At its core is the ever-complicated and deeply-devoted bond of sisterhood as the girls, left mostly to their own devices, must navigate their way through middle school, find comfort in each other, and learn the difference between food and nourishment.
In My Body Is a Book of Rules, Elissa Washuta corrals the synaptic gymnastics of her teeming bipolar brain, interweaving pop culture with neurobiology and memories of sexual trauma to tell the story of her fight to calm her aching mind and slip beyond the tormenting cycles of memory.
“A powerful YA novel about identity and prejudice.” —Entertainment Weekly Bijan Majidi is: Shy around girls Really into comics Decent at basketball Bijan Majidi is not: A terrorist What happens when a kid who’s flown under the radar for most of high school gets pulled off the bench to make the winning basket in a varsity playoff game? If his name is Bijan Majidi, life is suddenly high fives in the hallways and invitations to exclusive parties—along with an anonymous photo sent by a school cyberbully that makes Bijan look like a terrorist. The administration says they’ll find and punish the culprit. Bijan wants to pretend it never happened. He’s not ashamed of his Middle Eastern heritage; he just doesn’t want to be a poster child for Islamophobia. Lots of classmates rally around Bijan. Others make it clear they don’t want him or anybody who looks like him at their school. But it’s not always easy to tell your enemies from your friends. Here to Stay is a painfully honest, funny, authentic story about growing up, speaking out, and fighting prejudice.
