Synopses & Reviews
Lisa Teasley's
Glow in the Dark, a startlingly edgy, seductive debut collection of short stories, travels from New York to Northern California, Mexico, Los Angeles and Paris, dropping us dead center into the lives of those whose extreme behavior has led them to the threshold of significant transition.
Among the many intriguing, unique individuals, there is Marty wrestling with sobriety and his unspeakable obsession; Gita trying to conduct the love triangle she orchestrated; the frustrated lover, Tim, attempting to wedge himself between his girlfriend and her brother; and the surf chick Magda, tightrope-walking in her circus of drugs, opportunistic men and the waves of Baja California.
Finely crafted and painstakingly wrought, each of these 12 stories is a stunningly powerful, dynamic look into lives at the breaking point.
Review
"Teasley writes with a daring and original voice....Glow in the Dark is an unusually assured first story collection, and Lisa Teasley deserves high praise for giving the American short story an honest and original shot in the arm." San Francisco Chronicle
Review
"[Teasley's] characters are an exotic blend of the neurotic and the noirish tense, hungry, dangerous folk of diverse ethnicities who crave understanding and stimulation....Teasley lights up the plunge into the abyss." Village Voice
Review
"Written in prose both blunt and elliptical, the dozen tales form a gritty, unflinching yet empathetic collage of lives on the precipice of contemporary America." Los Angeles Times
Review
"Lisa Teasley's formidable storytelling brings to mind the verbal and visual juggernauts of a Zora Neale Hurston or a Quentin Tarantino, the dark righteous anger of the Beats, and the heavy metallic blues of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin." Kevin Powell
About the Author
Lisa Teasley is a native of Los Angeles, California, where she currently lives. Her fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies and publications such as Step Into a World: A Global Anthology of the New Black Literature, Brown Sugar, and Between C & D. She won the May Merrill Miller and the Amaranth Review awards for fiction. This is her first collection.