Archives de catégorie : Fiction

WEIRD TO EXIST d’Alison Zai

Vibrant yet darkly humorous comics for commiserating over life’s deepest concerns, from Instagram artist Alison Zai.

WEIRD TO EXIST:
Simple Comics About Complex Feelings
by Alison Zai
Ten Speed, April 2022

We all know the gut-wrenching pang that comes after accepting a beautiful moment will soon become a distant memory. We all get into cycles where it feels like the failures and disappointments just keep coming. Instagram comics artist Alison Zai presents WEIRD TO EXIST, a collection of 100 comics that depict these universal emotions and existential musings with great accuracy and empathy.
This bright, colorful book is divided into three intrinsic human acts—loving, creating, and existing–and, ultimately, comments on how weird it is to do all of that. Zai’s cheery anthropomorphic characters go through the motions of relationships, loneliness, creativity blocks, mental health concerns, social anxiety, and more. These comics voice the overwhelming dread and unpredictable chaos found in all aspects of being alive. With sharp levity and emotional complexity, WEIRD TO EXIST captures the feelings that are not easily communicated but widely felt. This collection features 30 never-before-published comics alongside a selection of beloved fan favorites from Zai’s Instagram account.

Alison Zai is a comics artist who has garnered success by sharing her art on Instagram and Tumblr. She lives in Los Angeles where she is expanding her career as an artist.

MANYWHERE de Morgan Thomas

Lush and uncompromising stories about characters crossing geographical borders and gender binaries.

MANYWHERE: Stories
by Morgan Thomas
mcd/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, January 2022
(via Defiore & Company)

The nine stories in Morgan Thomas’s shimmering debut collection MANYWHERE witness Southern queer and genderqueer characters determined to find themselves reflected in the annals of history, at whatever cost. As each character traces deceit and violence through tall tales and their own pasts, their journeys reveal the porous boundaries of body, land, and history, and the sometimes ruthless awakenings of self-discovery.
A trans woman finds her independence through the purchase of a pregnancy bump. A young Virginian flees their relationship, choosing instead to immerse themselves in the life of an intersex person from colonial-era Jamestown. A young writer tries to evade the murky and violent legacy of an ancestor, who supposedly disappeared into a midwifery bag. And in the uncanny title story, a young trans person brings home a replacement daughter for their elderly father.
Winding between reinvention and remembrance, transition and transcendence, these origin stories rebound across centuries. With warm, meticulous emotional intelligence, Morgan Thomas’s MANYWHERE uncovers how the stories we borrow to understand ourselves in turn shape the people we become. Ushering in a new form of queer mythmaking, MANYWHERE introduces a storyteller of uncommon range and talent.

Morgan Thomas’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Atlantic, The Kenyon Review, American Short Fiction, VICE, Joyland, Electric Literature, Ploughshares, them., and StoryQuarterly, where their story won the 2019 Fiction Prize. They are the recipient of a Bread Loaf Work-Study Grant, a Fullbright Grant, the Penny Wilkes Scholarship in Writing and the Environment, and the winner of the inaugural Southern Studies Fellowship in Arts and Letters. They have also received fellowships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Millay Colony for the Arts, and the Arctic Circle. A graduate of the University of Oregon MFA program, they live in Portland.

IN HER BOOTS de KJ Dell’Antonia

The new novel by New York Times bestselling author of The Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick The Chicken Sisters.

IN HER BOOTS
by KJ Dell’Antonia
Putnam, July 2022
(via Defiore & Company)

What if her mother was right about her all along? Rhett Smith fled the woman who taught her to protect her heart, hide her feelings and trust no one except herself for two decades of adventurous work, travel and reinvention, relying on her tougher alter ego, The Modern Pioneer Girl, for support and guidance, then wrote a popular book about it.
Now the MPG (aka Maggie Strong, Rhett’s pen name) is in hot demand while Rhett’s bold ex-pat life implodes with the end of her relationship and the death of her beloved grandmother. When the opportunity to step into her new fame arises, Rhett falters—and then, with her mother’s voice literally in her ear, shoves her best friend Jasmine on stage in her place.
But what seemed like a good idea at the time snowballs into chaos when the farm turns out to be headed for the auction block. Suddenly, Rhett’s mother is again in charge of her destiny, and nothing goads Rhett into impulsive action like feeling out of control—or possibly the re-appearance of her first love, now in the role of her mother’s henchman. She’ll do anything to take back her inheritance, and Jasmine, trying to escape her own disappointments, is more than willing to continue their ruse for as long as it takes. Together they concoct a scheme that will help them both recover all they’ve lost—but not exactly in the way they expect.

KJ Dell’Antonia is a writer and a regular contributor to the New York Times, where she wrote and edited the Motherlode blog from 2011 until 2016 and was a contributing editor to the Well Family section from 2016-2017. Prior to this, she was one of Slate’s XX Factor bloggers and a contributor to Slate, where she covered parenting and a broad range of subjects, from legal issues to pop culture. KJ lives in Lyme, New Hampshire, with her husband and four children.

THE SKIN AND ITS GIRL de Sarah Cypher

A girl is born with cobalt-blue skin to a Palestinian American family on the night their ancestral soap factory in Nablus is destroyed in an air strike; the family’s matriarch believes the girl embodies their sacred family history, but as she looks back from her auntie’s graveside, she recognizes a hidden queer history speaking through the folktales, echoing her fears as she faces a decision to emigrate with the woman she loves and continue the family’s cycle of exile.

THE SKIN AND ITS GIRL
by Sarah Cypher
Ballantine, April 2023
(via Defiore & Company)

On an early-April dawn in 2003, in a Portland hospital far from the Rummani family’s ancestral home in Palestine, a stillborn baby girl comes back to life and turns a vibrant cobalt blue. On the same day, the Rumanni’s beloved soap factory in Nablus is destroyed in a bombing. To Nuha, the girl’s great-aunt, there’s no question that this inexplicable child somehow embodies their sacred family history, when the Rummanis were among the wealthiest soap-makers and their blue soap was a symbol of a famous, unlikely love.
Decades later, still impossibly blue, Elspeth returns to the gravestone of her aunt to weave together her own story, the family legends, and the thread of Nuha’s twisting life as a queer woman who hid her identity to help the family emigrate to the US. Now, Elspeth is faced with an impossible decision of her own – whether she should stay where it’s safe or leave for the woman she loves and continue the family’s cycle of exile. Elspeth navigates this choice the only way her aunt taught her how – through lies and fables braided with the truth – looking for a path forward in the words underneath the words.
Filled with stunning images and poetic repetitions inspired by Arabic ghazals that grow like a rising tide as the plot circles in on itself, THE SKIN AND ITS GIRL is about the fictions we create to explain away the magic that surrounds us, as well as the stories that can create new magic in the world. It’s about the pressure to hide in someone else’s more conventional narrative, when finally telling your own story may be the only true survival.

Sarah Cypher is from a Lebanese American Christian family that traces its history to the Kanaan soap factory in Palestine, much like the novel’s characters. She has an MFA from Warren Wilson, and her writing has appeared in the North American Review, LEON, and Crab Orchard Review, among others. She works as a freelance editor and lives in Washington, DC with her wife. THE SKIN AND ITS GIRL is her debut novel.

PRETEND IT’S MY BODY de Luke Dani Blue

In a vivid debut story collection, Luke Dani Blue asks: is there such a thing as a real self? If so, how do you find it?

PRETEND IT’S MY BODY
by Luke Dani Blue
The Feminist Press, Fall 2022
(via Defiore & Company)

In the vein of Carmen Maria Machado, Kelly Link, and Daniel Lavery, and born of the author’s experience in and between genders, these stories blur the line between fantasy and reality, between the lives we wish for and the ones we actually lead, excavating new meanings from our varied dysphorias. Ranging from a tornado survivor grappling with a new identity, to a trans teen psychic that can only read undecided minds, from a woman telling her family of her plans to upload her consciousness and abandon her body, to con artists, runaways, and lost souls returning home, Blue’s characters all share an insistence on forging their own realities. Surreal, darkly funny, and always tender, PRETEND IT’S MY BODY is a collection bound together by the act of searching – for a story of one’s own, for a glimpse of certainty, and for a spark of recognition in others.

“The magic in [the short story] “Bad Things That Happen to Girls,” is so subtle and slow-building and so unprepossessing that, while reading it, I understood I was holding my breath only when the story started to swim before me…It’s a story that aches with truth and desperation, and I marvel at the way Blue ratchets up the motion, breath by breath, to the story’s logical but stunning end.” —Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies and Florida

Luke Dani Blue’s stories have appeared in the Colorado Review, Crab Orchard Review, and have been included on the list of the year’s most distinguished stories in Best American Short Stories 2016. They have an MFA from San Francisco State University and currently live in Alberta, Canada.