Creepy,
charming, and set slightly outside the realm of lived experience, this tale of
a man left behind in a resort town when his family returns home (or do they?)
somehow becomes a gripping, vital tale about the existential crisis that is
human life.
"Marie NDiaye is so intelligent, so composed, so good, that any description of her work feels like an understatement." ―The New York Review of Books
Herman’s wife and child are nowhere to be found, and the weather in the village, perfectly agreeable just days earlier, has taken a sudden turn for the worse. Tourist season is over. It’s time for the vacationing Parisians, Herman and his family included, to abandon their rural getaways and return to normal life. But where has Herman’s family gone? Concerned, he sets out into the oppressive rain and cold for news of their whereabouts. The…
I
love fiction that makes me reexamine what I want and how to acquire it best,
and Milks’ short story collection is jam-packed with tales that do exactly that
across a panoply of desires.
I find myself returning to this book every few
months to check my narrative instincts as a writer: Am I being disgusting
enough? Am I pulling the rug out from under the reader with enough force? Am I
exerting sufficient control over the relationship between the reader and the
read subject?
It’s a sharp, hilarious, jarring collection that keeps giving me
something new at every read.
"Carefully considered, successful instances of experimental fiction" disrupt gender, genre, and identity in this deranged, otherworldly collection (Literary Hub).
A woman metamorphoses into a giant slug; another quite literally eats her heart out; a wasp falls in love with an orchid; and hair starts sprouting from the walls. These stories slip and slide between genres—from video games to fan fiction, body horror to choose-your-own-adventure—as characters cycle through giddying changes in gender, physiology, species, and identity. Collapsing boundaries between bodies and forms, these fictions interrogate the visceral, gross, and absurd.
“This book is fucking weird,” wrote Brit Mandelo in 2015. It’s…
Some
form of space alien subsists by adopting human form and developing intimate
relationships with unsuspecting victims, who the alien then eats, with varying
amounts of regret.
I love this book so much I brought it to dinner to read at a
local inn and the server asked about it; she then went out and bought it and
read it and loved it and it’s started a bit of a trend in our teeny, not-terribly
book-friendly community.
Squid Game meets The Left Hand of Darkness meets Under the Skin in this radical literary sensation from South Korea about an alien's hunt for food that transforms into an existential crisis about what it means to be human.
After crashing their spacecraft in the middle of nowhere, a shapeshifting alien find themself stranded on an unfamiliar planet and disabled by Earth's gravity. To survive, they will need to practice walking. And what better way than to hunt for food? As they discover, humans are delicious.
Intelligent, clever, and adaptable, the alien shift their gender, appearance, and conduct to suit…
Whether for entertainment, under the guise of medicine, or to propel consumerism, heinous acts are perpetrated daily on women’s bodies. In Body Horror: Capitalism, Fear, Misogyny, Jokes, award-winning journalist Anne Elizabeth Moore catalogs the global toll of capitalism on our physical autonomy. Weaving together unflinching research and surprising humor, these essays range from investigative—probing the Cambodian garment industry, the history of menstrual products, or the gender biases of patent law—to uncomfortably intimate. Informed by her own navigation of several autoimmune diagnoses, Moore examines what it takes to seek care and community in the increasingly complicated, problematic, and disinterested US healthcare system.
A Lambda Literary Award finalist and a Chicago Review of Books Nonfiction Award shortlist title, Body Horror is “sharp, shocking, and darkly funny. . . . Brainy and historically informed, this collection is less a rallying cry or a bitter diatribe than a series of irreverent and ruthlessly accurate jabs at a culture that is slowly devouring us” (Publishers Weekly, starred review). Featuring a new introduction and several original essays, as well as illustrations by Xander Marro, this new edition of Body Horror is a fascinating, insightful portrait of the gore that encapsulates contemporary American politics.
