A stunning collection. Beautifully written with honesty, generosity, insight, inventiveness, and a strong sense of voice. These stories hit me in that sweet spot that the rarest of fiction does for me, where the characters and the world and the feel seem at once intimately familiar and as if I'm seeing them for the first time. I guess that's the definition of uncanny, actually.



Most of the stories feature queer characters although refreshingly none are focused on queerness. (Including the most s

A stunning collection. Beautifully written with honesty, generosity, insight, inventiveness, and a strong sense of voice. These stories hit me in that sweet spot that the rarest of fiction does for me, where the characters and the world and the feel seem at once intimately familiar and as if I'm seeing them for the first time. I guess that's the definition of uncanny, actually.



Most of the stories feature queer characters although refreshingly none are focused on queerness. (Including the most speculative of them, which is about a trans guy who wakes up one morning with a miniature version of a piece of the Gaza strip happening on his head). It's so lovely to read strange, sometimes science fiction stories about various stripes of queer characters that aren't about coming out or being queer, where most often being queer is entirely incidental, but also casually present when it's relevant.



Most of the stories are set in rural, white, poor America. I won't pretend to really know anything about that part of the US, but from the little I know about current politics there, it does seem urgent for Americans who aren't familiar with this world to learn about what it's like; one of the blurbs says the book "should be required reading for anyone who's trying to understand America in 2017," which absolutely makes sense.



Here's a taste of what these stories are about: Baptists over 60 talking sex. Tweens make friends with a homeless woman living in a cemetery mauseleom. A queer writer returning to her Midwest home to crime and strange floating green orbs. A lesbian takes ecstasy with her schizophrenic girlfriend at a Mensa gathering of people with super high IQs.



Here are some snippets of Woods's darkly funny, hard-hitting, beautiful prose. If these don't convince you to read the book, I don't know what will.



"He kept flipping the blinds open and closed. They made a clinking sounds like plastic change, worthless and desperate to accomplish some impossible purchase, his freedom."



"An adamant evangelical Christian with an obsession with perfect grammar, and an unfortunate perm, was a difficult thing to be in junior high."



"Since she was young, she'd believed. But also, she'd questioned, and when her husband died, it was like someone had struck her in the face with the knuckled back of a strong hand made of nothing but that question."



"But then I thought maybe it wasn't CBGB I missed but being twenty and feeling like I was really doing something drinking with a fake ID... It just doesn't feel the same listening to live rock when you're going to be thirty in a year and your second drink is already making you more tired than drunk and you can't help but worry you're going to feel a little sick and depressed the next day."



"There is a moment, for every child, when the adults around them...decide that the child's dreams must be obliterated. Adults do this so that they can replace the noble and ridiculous aspirations of children with the ignoble and ridiculous aspirations of grown-ups. They do this because they too, in a moment where they were on the other end of this awful thing they are doing, were taught that only the most ignoble and ugly things are attainable. For this reason, disappointment with one's life becomes a much more believable outcome. And, as Americans hate failure, this actually becomes the grudging goal of how one's life should be lived--passing time with hated tasks, thankful and even possessive of the most basic aspects of survival: family, roof, clothing, food."

