Elegies for Uncanny Girls Jennifer Colville 9780253024299

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.

Jennifer Colville is the founding editor of PromptPress, a journal for visual art. She holds an MFA from Syracuse University and a Ph.D. in English and Creative Writing from the University of Utah. She lives in Iowa City with her husband and two children.

Colville's prose shines when it is at its most lyrical and most psychologically probing. . . . when Colville is at her best, we'll believe whatever she tells us.

Brisk, satisfying, and fiercely observant.

"Colville's elegies are equal parts human and hopeful, fragile and feminine. They are, in the end, stories that give back agency to women and young girls in the specific areas they need it most."