Fresh Ink: Spotlight on Debut Books of All Kinds

This gutsy collection offers a brilliant reflection on life as a young lesbian and breast cancer survivor. Through discussions of madness, religion, gender and feminism, Gruber captivates with heartbreaking candor and wit. From her teenage Dian Fossey to her Virginia Woolf of Drama Club, Gruber invites us into a world of brash, bookish hilarity, as she navigates an unusual life, interrupted. In You're Not Edith, Gruber asks herself how best to live and finds answers big enough for all of us.

Read an excerpt HERE.

And another HERE.

Read an interview with the author HERE.


Praise for the book:
“These stories are especially moving for their simplicity and for Gruber's honest, straightforward manner of storytelling. The result is a slim but powerful book.” ~Publishers Weekly

“In-your-face funny and heartbreakingly sad….Gruber's essays add up to a kaleidoscopically engaging read.” ~Booklist

Fresh Ink: Spotlight on Debut Books of All Kinds

A wild, inventive ride of a short story collection from a distinctive new American storyteller.

The stories in Thomas Pierce’s Hall of Small Mammals take place at the confluence of the commonplace and the cosmic, the intimate and the infinite. A fossil-hunter, a comedian, a hot- air balloon pilot, parents and children, believers and nonbelievers, the people in these stories are struggling to understand the absurdity and the magnitude of what it means to exist in a family, to exist in the world.

In “Shirley Temple Three,” a mother must shoulder her son’s burden—a cloned and resurrected wooly mammoth who wreaks havoc on her house, sanity, and faith. In “The Real Alan Gass,” a physicist in search of a mysterious particle called the “daisy” spends her days with her boyfriend, Walker, and her nights with the husband who only exists in the world of her dreams, Alan Gass. Like the daisy particle itself—“forever locked in a curious state of existence and nonexistence, sliding back and forth between the two”—the stories in Thomas Pierce’s Hall of Small Mammals are exquisite, mysterious, and inextricably connected.

From this enchanting primordial soup, Pierce’s voice emerges—a distinct and charming testament of the New South, melding contemporary concerns with their prehistoric roots to create a hilarious, deeply moving symphony of stories.

 

 

Author mini bio HERE. 

 

Listen to an NPR interview with Pierce.

Read one of the stories HERE.

And here is a letter for the readers from the author:

Dear Reader,

I’d like to tell you a little bit about my first book, Hall of Small Mammals. This is a book of stories about people trying to make sense of an unusual situation—that situation being life itself. They are about people looking for meaning—in religion, in science, in family, in geology and paleontology, in trips a thousand feet off the ground in a hot air balloon. I’ve been told that I write stories that are odd, strange, or weird, and I won’t quibble too much with those descriptions except to say how odd, strange, and weird life can be (when you forget to pretend you understand it).

For instance: Years ago, my grandmother was walking on the beach and found a massive almost-black shark’s tooth in the sand and gave it to me. It was possibly the best gift I’d ever received. (I was nine.) It might have come from a terrifying prehistoric shark called the Megalodon. The biggest shark that ever lived, some of them longer than an eighteen-wheeler, and now I had its tooth in my sock drawer. What a world! One day it could be our teeth in a sock drawer. (In case fossils appeal to you, there are quite a few in this book.)

In the collection’s first story, a newly retired woman ends up caring for a resurrected woolly mammoth named Shirley Temple. Sure, yes, that’s odd. But consider this: Pretty soon, tomorrow morning maybe, a team of scientists will stand in front of some news cameras and announce that they’ve successfully brought some pitiful creature back from extinction, a passenger pigeon or a dodo bird or a woolly mammoth. We haven’t seen a living mammoth for thousands of years, but we’re still finding their carcasses in the ice. Not just bones—but skin, hair, and organs too. Some Russian researchers found an especially juicy mammoth corpse last year in Siberia. They named her Buttercup. When they sliced her open, she oozed blood! A biotech company in South Korea hopes Buttercup will be the key to the world’s first cloned mammoth. Buttercup returneth.

Down in my home state, a little girl who enjoys looking for shark’s teeth on her school playground during recess wrote her state senator earlier this year asking why it was South Carolina didn’t have an official fossil. We have an official beverage (milk) and snack (boiled peanuts) and dance (shag) but somehow we’d neglected to name a fossil, like most other states. She nominated the Columbian woolly mammoth as an ideal candidate, as its teeth had been discovered in a Carolina swamp almost three hundred years ago. Some lawmakers got behind the idea, but the bill almost died in the senate when a few Bible-thumping members thought it ought to explicitly acknowledge the creator of those fossils too. Drawing from the Book of Genesis, they wanted to amend the bill thusly: “The Columbian Mammoth, which was created on the Sixth Day with the other beasts of the field, is designated as the official State Fossil.” Just before the senate voted, the majority leader suggested they name the mammoth Lazarus. “Because,” he said, “we’re bringing it back to life.” Weirdness, it abounds.

I do hope you enjoy this book—that its stories move you, that they allow you, if even for a moment, to forget to pretend you understand what it means to be alive in such a strange place as this.

All best, 

Thomas

Fresh Ink: Spotlight on Debut Books of All Kinds

At an obscure South Carolina nursing home, a lost world reemerges as a disabled elderly woman undergoes newfangled brain-restoration procedures and begins to explore her environment with the assistance of strap-on robot legs. At a deluxe medical spa on a nameless Caribbean island, a middle-aged woman hopes to revitalize her fading youth with grotesque rejuvenating therapies that combine cutting-edge medical technologies with holistic approaches and the pseudo-religious dogma of Zen-infused self-help. And in a rinky-dink mill town, an adolescent girl is unexpectedly inspired by the ravings and miraculous levitation of her fundamentalist friend's weird grandmother. These are only a few of the scenarios readers encounter in Julia Elliott's debut collection, The Wilds. In these genre-bending stories, teetering between the ridiculous and the sublime, Elliott's language-driven fiction uses outlandish tropes to capture poignant moments in her humble characters' lives. Without abandoning the tenets of classic storytelling, Elliott revels in lush lyricism, dark humor, and experimental play.

Read an excerpt HERE.

Read an interview with the author HERE.



Praise for the book:
"Remarkable . . . [Elliott's] dark, modern spin on Southern Gothic creates tales that surprise, shock, and sharply depict vice and virtue."~Publishers Weekly

"Robots may search for love, but there’s nothing wilder than human nature in this genre-bending short story collection from debut writer Elliott . . . This book will take you to places you never dreamed of going and aren't quite sure you want to stay, but you won't regret the journey."~Kirkus

"Humans, robots, and humans with robotic limbs pine for carnal satisfaction in Elliott’s impressively inventive, often macabre collection, animated by her characters’ outsize appetites for sex, knowledge, faith, and kindness."~Booklist

“Readers who grew up loving that fizzy, edge-of-the-lake feeling of diving into a tale will adore Julia Elliott's The Wilds. Elliott's worlds are fully imagined and wholly immersive; her sentences unfurl in the most surprising and glorious ways. These are tantalizingly strange, eerie and funny and unpredictable tales of transformation.”~Karen Russell, author of Vampires in the Lemon Grove

“Julia Elliott’s magical debut collection, The Wilds, brings together some of the most original, hilarious, and mind-bending stories written in the last two decades. She journeys deep into mythic terrains with an explorer’s courage and a savant’s wit, and the reports she sends back from imagination’s hinterlands are charged with a vernacular that crackles with insight. Angela Carter, Kelly Link, and Karen Russell are similar visionaries in the short story form, but Elliott is very much her own irrepressible voice—and it’s one well worth heeding. The Wilds is simply a milestone achievement.”~Bradford Morrow, author of The Uninnocent 
 

Fresh Ink: Spotlight on Debut Books of All Kinds

An astute, lively, and heartfelt debut story collection by an exciting new voice in contemporary fiction

Marine Park—in the far reaches of Brooklyn, train-less and tourist-free—finds its literary chronicler in Mark Chiusano. Chiusano’s dazzling stories delve into family, boyhood, sports, drugs, love, and all the weird quirks of growing up in a tight-knit community on the edge of the city. In the tradition of Junot Díaz’s Drown, Stuart Dybek’s The Coast of Chicago, and Russell Banks’s Trailerpark, this is a poignant and piercing collection—announcing the arrival of a distinct new voice in American fiction.

Praise for the book:

“Chiusano gives a voice to the lesser-known Brooklyn neighborhood of Marine Park in his collection of interconnected stories that unearth broader truths among quotidian events, from haircuts to train rides.”  —The Huffington Post
 
“[A] promising debut collection . . .  23-year-old Chiusano revisits his native Brooklyn—specifically, Marine Park. The neighborhood, distinguished by its salt marshes, canals, and large waterfront park, serves as the collection’s focal point, bringing together a multigenerational cast of characters. They include a scientist who worked on the Manhattan Project in “Shatter the Trees and Blow Them Away”; an ex-high school basketball star turned gun-toting drug dealer in “Ed Monahan’s Game”; and the brothers Jamison and Lorris Favero, whom we follow from adolescence in the early 2000s to adulthood in the present, in eight of the stories. In two of them, “Heavy Lifting” and “Open Your Eyes,” Chiusano is at his best, carefully delineating sibling relationships and building tension.”
—Publishers Weekly

“From slice-of-life tales to hair-raising thrillers to traditional relationship dramas. . . . Chiusano’s debut collection takes readers along the streets and through the history of an isolated Brooklyn neighborhood, portraying everyday people who call Marine Park home. . . . Chiusano’s impressive prose and topical range suggest the onset of a promising literary career worth keeping an eye on.”
—Booklist

And a visual recommendation from John Green: