Slug and Other Stories

"Carefully considered, successful instances of experimental fiction" disrupt gender, genre, and queer identity in this deranged, otherworldly collection (Literary Hub).

Über den Autor / die Autorin

Megan Milks is the author of Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body and Remember the Internet: Tori Amos Bootleg Webring. With Marisa Crawford, they are coeditor of We Are the Baby-Sitters Club: Essays and Artwork from Grown-Up Readers; with KJ Cerankowski, they are coeditor of Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives. Born in Virginia, they currently live in Brooklyn.

Zusammenfassung

"Carefully considered, successful instances of experimental fiction" disrupt gender, genre, and identity in this deranged, otherworldly collection (Literary Hub).
A woman metamorphoses into a giant slug; another quite literally eats her heart out; a wasp falls in love with an orchid; and hair starts sprouting from the walls. These stories slip and slide between genres—from video games to fan fiction, body horror to choose-your-own-adventure—as characters cycle through giddying changes in gender, physiology, species, and identity. Collapsing boundaries between bodies and forms, these fictions interrogate the visceral, gross, and absurd.

“This book is fucking weird,” wrote Brit Mandelo in 2015. It’s only gotten weirder since. Slug and Other Stories is a revised and expanded edition of a contemporary cult classic. Finally back in print, this collection is a testament to the messy anti-logic of queer feelings by a revelatory new voice.

Vorwort

• Both digital and print ARCs available in May 2021


• ARCs to sales reps, as well as select indie bookseller mailing


• Both digital and print ARCs sent to media for national print, radio, and online campaign; targeted to oulets focused on the following coverage: literary, LGBTQ+, feminist


• Promotion on Feminist Press e-newsletter, website, and social media channels


• Promotion on author's website and social media channels


• New blurb confirmed from Andrea Lawlor, as well as more blurbs sought from (all are author's personal contacts): Myriam Gurba, Kristen Arnett, Carmen Maria Machado, Patty Yumi Cottrell, Torrey Peters, Casey Plett, Sofia Samatar, Caitlin Kunkel, Lidia Yuknavitch, Dodie Bellamy, Eileen Myles, Jordy Rosenberg


• Social media campaign, with the book promoted by prominent feminist and queer literary influencers


• Because this is a revised second edition of an earlier book, promotion through events will happen earlier in the year through the virtual tour for Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body

Zusatztext

—Autostraddle

"An antirealist anthem to sexual pleasure. . . . This
pan-erotic feast never stops surprising with its fan-fiction tropes,
laugh-out-loud social satire, and gorgeous sentences you can’t help but
underline." —Artforum
"Tender little stories that will make you gasp and squirm." —Kirkus Reviews
“In these unforgettable stories, Milks’ gift for specificity and poignant body horror are on full display. . . . The gore and guts and unbelievable antics are perfect reading for this dystopian era, and Milks is an exquisite writer for this time.” —Booklist

“Unapologetically bold and insightful.” —Publishers Weekly

“Video game logic, middle school best friend clubs, choose your own adventure: Megan Milks both critiques and indulges in pop culture forms, often by way of viscid zoological/extraterrestrial avatars, and does so while saying profound things about trans bodies, intimacy, and vulnerability. How did they do all this? They are so cool, and I definitely want to be their friend.” —Jeanne Thornton, author of Summer Fun
"Few writers are able to surprise and thrill me like Megan Milks does. Slug and Other Stories moves from fantasy to embodiment, inventing an eroticism that explodes binaries in ways that are both destabilizing and a real turn-on." —Dodie Bellamy, author of When the Sick Rule the World
“Slug and Other Stories mixes pop culture, Greek myth, queer feminism, and childhood nostalgia into a gory and gorgeous mess. I got my hands dirty digging into Megan Milks’s sanguine collection of short stories. This prose oozes. This prose dripped perversely into my consciousness and stuck. Only a steady and sagacious writer like Milks can make paddling through this kind of muck so absolutely pleasurable.” —Amber Dawn, author of Sub Rosa
“These stories are pure force: they norm deviance, make violence effulgent, ungender and regender sexualities. Each story is a kitsch throwback to back in the day when reading was a fun choose your own adventure, or, these stories are not just carnal, not just animalistic, not just girly: they’re amphibian, our full corporeal tenderized to satisfaction, which is to say—hot.” —Lily Hoang, author of Unfinished
“Genre conventions are commonly thought of as restrictive rules, but in these stories Megan Milks shows that these conventions can be agents of perversion, both glaringly porous and ridiculously invasive. Over the course of the book, Milks invokes and employs the genre conventions of fan fiction on, for example, Kafka’s Metamorphosis and teen comedies, then mixes in young adult novels, video games, choose-your-own adventure tales, epistolary novels, gothic tales, family romances, and “traumarama” entries, until this melee of genres interrupt each other, parasite each other, distort each other. The result of this romp is absurd, grotesque, parapornographic, violent, gurlesque, but most of all hilarious in a dead-pan kind of way.” —Johannes Göransson, author of Haute Surveillance 
“Wittig’s Lesbian Body goes superfreak in this celebration of excess, this inquiry into boundarylessness, this exercise in genre-fuck, this slug-and/or-be-slugged fest. In a collection whose voices range from hard-boiled to hyperbolic to hysterical, Milks seriously probes the implications of social constructionism: we’ve made a monster (albeit sometimes hot, albeit sometimes queer) of the sexed body, individual and politic. Somehow, happily, Milks keep it comic too. Lots of parts and effluvia, no gratuitous grossness!” —Alexandra Chasin, author of Brief
“Megan Milks’s collection is a fearless romp through the post-avant wasteland of fictions both Lynchian and Homeric. Milks puts Shelley Jackson’s The Melancholy of Anatomy through a cement mixer, grinding out tales as sure to delight as they radically defamiliarize. Here, Sweet Valley Twins gets a reboot finally worthy of the world their YA books helped to make weird. Milks is a master of the absurd grotesque, and Slug and Other Stories is their powerful annunciation.” —Davis Schneiderman, author of Multifesto 

Produktdetails

• Autoren: Megan Milks
• Verlag: Ingram Publishers Services
• Sprache: Englisch
• Produktform: Taschenbuch
• Erscheint: 09.11.2021, verspätet
• EAN: 9781952177842
• ISBN: 978-1-952177-84-2
• Seiten: 240
• Themen: Belletristik > Erzählende Literatur; FICTION / Absurdist, FICTION / LGBT / Transgender, FICTION / Feminist