Elegies for Uncanny Girls [Paperback]

Unsettling and perceptive, these short stories challenge American girlhood in all its delusions, conflicting messages, and treacherous terrain. Wide- and wise-eyed, mysterious girls leave their realities behind for strange and slightly unreal places at the edges of the country. Alternatively they hover over their Midwestern homes in interior worlds of their own creation. The stories in Elegies for Uncanny Girls stand at a boundary where both the girls bodies and their tales are either their own or laid claim to by the culture and characters that surround them. A young woman whose body continually shrinks and expands moves to Los Angeles to make a movie about tragic merpeople; bewildered and seeking guidance, a new mom strikes up a conversation with a woman with detachable hands; and spurred on by a new ally who might just be a figment of her imagination, a girl decides she can choose her own friends.

Gorgeously terrifying and magically perceptive, Jennifer Colville's brilliant elegies spark the mind and ignite the senses, exposing the secret, hyperreal experiences of girls and young women negotiating the treacherous terrain of a world where others see them as victims or monsters, virgins, nymphets, or soon-to-be spinsterswhere they know themselves as miraculous, beautiful and vast, dangerously potent. For uncanny girls the body is not a limit, but a multiverse of thrilling possibilities!Colvilles prose shines when it is at its most lyrical and most psychologically probing. . . . when Colville is at her best, well believe whatever she tells us.The only thing more uncanny than these girls is Colville's ability to arrest the heart, turn a phrase, turn an idea.In lyrical, playful prose Colville explores our innermost irrational urges and jealousies: family life in all its complexities. The characters in these stories are heartbroken and twitching but ready for more, and it is a delight to watch them tremble, puzzle, hope, forgive.

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