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Staff Pick
Fierce, elegant, beautifully grotesque, unabashedly sexy, unapologetically brutal. Exploring the effects of trauma and want on the psyche, Lidia Yuknavitch masterfully mixes sharp reality with the fantastical. Whether about blood-hungry mythical graywolves or desperate addicts seeking a fix, the stories in Verge are surreal, dark fairy tales of pure, deep-down truth. Recommended By Gigi L., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
Named one of the Most Anticipated Books of the Year by Vogue and HelloGiggles
A fiercely empathetic group portrait of the marginalized and outcast in moments of crisis, from one of the most galvanizing voices in American fiction.
I tell you, do not go near that place. Do not go near it. Graywolves guard the ground there. Girls are growing from guts, enough for a body and language all the way out of this world.
An eight-year-old trauma victim is enlisted as an underground courier, rushing frozen organs through the alleys of Eastern Europe. A young janitor transforms discarded objects into a fantastical, sprawling miniature city until a shocking discovery forces him to rethink his creation. A brazen child tells off a pack of schoolyard tormentors with the spirited invention of an eleventh commandment. A wounded man drives eastward, through tears and grief, toward an unexpected transcendence.
Lidia Yuknavitch's bestselling novels The Book of Joan and The Small Backs of Children, and her groundbreaking memoir The Chronology of Water, have established her as one of our most urgent contemporary voices: a writer with a rare gift for tracing the jagged boundaries between art and trauma, sex and violence, destruction and survival. In Verge, her first collection of short fiction, she turns her eye to life on the margins, in all its beauty and brutality. A book of heroic grace and empathy, Verge is a viscerally powerful and moving survey of our modern heartache life.
Review
"Insistently visceral . . . These howls from the throats of women, queer characters, the impoverished, and the addicted remind us of the beauty and pain of our shared humanity. Gutsy stories from one of our most fearless writers." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"Yuknavitch is one of the most celebrated contemporary writers. [Now she] returns with a collection of short stories that embody her unique blend of the unsettling and the delightful." Electric Literature
Review
"A vertiginous and revelatory book whose characters — sometimes in desperate situations, and sometimes, finally, in a place of safety — have much to say about the world that we live in now. Lidia Yuknavitch is astonishing."
Kelly Link
Review
"Verge is a bouquet of dynamite: explosive, deadly, and spectacularly beautiful. These stories captivated me like modern fairy tales, and like those dark lessons they showed me how resilience is forged through survival, beauty through brokenness, joy by fire. The women who occupy them are my favorite kinds of heroines: as flawed as they are furious, as bold as they are tender. I won't soon forget them."
Melissa Febos
About the Author
Lidia Yuknavitch is the nationally bestselling author of the novels The Book of Joan, The Small Backs of Children, Dora: A Headcase, and the memoir The Chronology of Water. She is the recipient of two Oregon Book Awards, a Willamette Writers Award, and was a finalist for the 2017 Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize and the 2012 PEN Center Creative Nonfiction Award. She lives in Portland, Oregon.