This Book Will Change Your Life - Domestic Apparitions by Meg Tuite.

 

Travel. Read. Fast. Amanda Knox. And apparitions. In the air. Cars. On living rooms floors.  We are movement and read and  Domestic Apparitions by the Meg Tuite. It is story as sketch. Family as fragment. Life as a series of disturbances that bounce into one another and congeal. It is also the female experience as filtered through violence and oppression and we recognize that women's experiences are far more wide-ranging than what we're reacting to, that there is love, friendship and family as a nurturing and safe place, but in a world where men endlessly project their sexual and aberrant fantasies onto women, where women's voices have been suppressed historically, and ignored, and continue to be suppressed in ignored in various forms in the literary world and beyond, these stories need to be told, highlighted and given a place to be broadcast. And in that way Domestic Apparitions is reminiscent of other work we've had the chance to read recently, books like Slut Lullabies by Gina Frangello, Sweet Charlotte's Seventh Mistake by Cori Crooks and The Lost Episodes of Beatie Scareli by Ginnetta Correli, books that eschew metaphor and magical realism and try to capture something in real time in all its ugliness. Which makes them important and necessary, but aren't reduced by this necessaryness as something merely important, not when these books are this creative, thoughtful and bursting with storytelling talent.    

Frangello. The Big Other. Slut Lullabies. Sweet.

Very excited to see Chicago writer and TBWCYL, Inc. favorite Gina Frangello being interviewed at The Big Other about the release of her quite fine short story collection Slut Lullabies. Please do take a look and please do obtain a copy of Slut Lullabies because it just might change your life. Meanwhile, feel free to prep for the interview with the below excerpt and if you still find that this just isn't quite enough Frangello for your liking, please also feel free to check-out our recent podcast with her. It's quite scintillating to say the least.

Davis: What feelings will reading Slut Lullabies induce in the reader?

Gina: Well, of course who knows, right? The stories in the collection are not related, so I hope they induce a range of feelings. Some are fairly satirical or a little goofy, and even the darker ones are, I hope, funny in their own way. But mainly I hear that my writing tends to make people emotionally uncomfortable. All the blurbs on the back of the book say this in one form or another, I think. Most people who have said this mean it in a good way. A few—mainly in corporate New York publishing—have meant it in a negative way. But I like the idea of my work making people uncomfortable. To me, if that’s true, it’s a great compliment.

This Book - Slut Lullabies by Gina Frangello - and Podcast - "Quasi-Covered" - Will Change Your Life.

We had the great pleasure of not only reading Chicago author Gina Frangello's fantastic short story collection Slut Lullabies this week, but sitting down with Gina for the latest edition of This Podcast Will Change Your Life, which for those of you tracking these kinds of things is Episode Twenty-Four in the series. We would add that we conducted this podcast on the north side of Chicago and we are adding this because in so many ways we were both far from home, even though Gina grew-up in Chicago. We mention this because the stories in Slut Lullabies are very much about place, the places you come from, the places you are trying to get to and the places you actually end-up, all of which are constantly clashing for the characters in these stories. That said, these stories are about more than place, they are also about women, and more than any stories we've read recently, about the violence directed towards women every day and how matter of fact this violence is treated by these women. In fact, the women in these stories have come to expect violence merely because they are women and that's the way it is in the world we live in, a reality as crushing and sad as we expect to encounter in any book, anywhere, any time soon.

Fictionaut Five. Gina Frangello. Fire Sale.

We were most thrilled to run into a Fictionaut Five with the quite awesome Gina Frangello and we think you might be too. Do you know what else we're thrilled about? The Fire Sale.