We are SUPER excited to announce that this month’s Statesman Selects pick is the fabulous new short story collection by Kelly Luce, Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail. The book is the first published by the fine folks at A Strange Object, the new Austin-based small press we may have mentioned one or two or eight hundred times on this blog.
The book has a beautiful trailer, which we highly recommend you visit. And it has some fine folks singing its praises:
“Let us all now append one more syllable to the list of the most acrobatic imaginations in contemporary American fiction: Saunders, Bender, Link, and Luce! This book in an incantation, and I adore it.” – Claire Vaye Watkins, author of Battleborn
“In Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail, Kelly Luce manages the impossible: each story delicate and enormous, intricate, glitteringly beautiful, never less than strange, never less than profound, ten spiderwebs astonishingly spun. Readers: here is your new favorite short story writer.” – Elizabeth McCracken, author of An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination
“Kelly Luce writes rings around most writers, and this is only her first book. Hana Sasaki is bold, strange, funny, and tender. These stories are just such a pleasure to read—so forget this blurb and get to the damn book.” – Victor LaValle, author of The Devil in Silver
“Kelly Luce’s stories render memorably and with deadpan understatement their protagonists’ obsessive combinations of longing and grief and bafflement in the face of their loved ones’ emotional requirements, even as their worlds slip seamlessly into the uncanny. These stories unsettle as much as they entertain.” – Jim Shepard, author of You Think That’s Bad
“Kelly Luce writes stories whose charm is a lasting effect. Her work is witty, unpredictable, and freshly written. There’s a genuine imagination at work here that is a delight to spend time with.” – Stuart Dybek, author of The Coast of Chicago
This is the first book for Kelly Luce, who is a fellow at the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas and fiction editor of Bat City Review. Her work has appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Crazyhorse, Kenyon Review, American Short Fiction, The Southern Review, and other magazines.
Catch the Statesman’s review of Hana Sasaki in the Insight & Books portion of the October 6 Sunday edition. We’ll officially launch the book here at BookPeople on Wednesday, October 9 at 7pm when Luce appears in conversation with the Statesman’s Joe Gross.
BookPeople 