I'm excited to announce that True Ash, my latest short fiction collection, will be published by Black Lawrence Press in August 2018. Co-written with Elizabeth Colen, these short stories form an interlinked narrative arc focused on the lives of characters working for Sucrawin, a powerful (albeit fictitious) company in Seattle. The gorgeous cover art comes from Corinne Botz's "Meadowlands" series. True Ash is available for pre-order now on the Black Lawrence website. I'm also happy to send advance review copies if you'd like to review the book or incorporate it into your classroom.
Sensual, haunting; askew to reality in a way that unsettles. I love these stories.
--Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties: Stories
So much is packed into True Ash: love, loss, danger, desire…and especially the danger of desire itself. The characters in these linked stories are plagued by an “endless stream of wanting,” and the book is by turns sexy and scary as the characters prove again and again that they are as capable of destruction as they are of intimacy. Although they hunger for human connection, they move across a rotating stage of semi-magical worlds dominated by a kind of rogue technology that seems designed to keep them apart. But they keep trying, in stories that examine everything from corporate culture to environmental degradation to art brokerage. What is most beautiful in this book of much beauty is how each story exists as a beacon of hope, connecting to readers through gorgeous language that evokes everything we most love and fear.
Remember when you crawled into bed, pulled the covers over your head, and devoured a book cover to cover? True Ash will bring you to that edge, with a side of whiskey, a hand in the bottomless candy dish, a lover next to a lover next to Betty Crocker or a dead ringer for Taylor Swift. You will emerge questioning what is/isn’t, a candy cigarette poised on your lip, as you revel in the collaborative lyrical genius of Colen and Guess.
--Natasha Kochicheril Moni, author of The Cardiologist’s Daughter and Lay Down Your Fleece
So much is packed into True Ash: love, loss, danger, desire…and especially the danger of desire itself. The characters in these linked stories are plagued by an “endless stream of wanting,” and the book is by turns sexy and scary as the characters prove again and again that they are as capable of destruction as they are of intimacy. Although they hunger for human connection, they move across a rotating stage of semi-magical worlds dominated by a kind of rogue technology that seems designed to keep them apart. But they keep trying, in stories that examine everything from corporate culture to environmental degradation to art brokerage. What is most beautiful in this book of much beauty is how each story exists as a beacon of hope, connecting to readers through gorgeous language that evokes everything we most love and fear.
--Kelly Magee, author of With Animal and The Neighborhood
Comments