Stoop City
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
WINNER OF THE 2021 RELIT AWARD FOR SHORT FICTION
A sea witch, a bossy Virgin Mary, and a lesbian widow’s wife—in ghost form—walk into a short story collection ...
Welcome to Stoop City, where your neighbours include a condo-destroying cat, a teen queen beset by Catholic guilt, and an emergency clinic staffed entirely by lovelorn skeptics. Couples counseling with Marzana, her girlfriend's ghost, might not be enough to resolve past indiscretions; our heroine could need a death goddess ritual or two. Plus, Hoofy’s not sure if his missing scam-artist boyfriend was picked up by the cops, or by that pretty blonde, their last mark. When Jan takes a room at Plague House, her first year of university takes an unexpected turn—into anarcho-politics and direct action, gender studies and late-night shenanigans with Saffy, her captivating yet cagey housemate.
From the lovelorn Mary Louise, who struggles with butch bachelorhood, to rural teens finding—and found by—adult sexualities, to Grimm’s “The Golden Goose” rendered as a jazz dance spectacle, Kristyn Dunnion’s freewheeling collection fosters a radical revisioning of community. Dunnion goes wherever there’s a story to tell—and then, out of whispers and shouts, echoes and snippets, gritty realism and speculative fiction, illuminates the delicate strands that hold us all together.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The heroines in Dunnion's defiant collection offer refreshingly blunt observations about the world around them, in settings alternating between the gritty and the fantastical. "How We Learn to Lie" begins with the line, "Julia would have done him in a heartbeat, before" and charts how narrator Julia, a bitter real estate agent, came to be disgusted by the "Ken-doll" client she once would have found attractive. In "Asset Mapping in Stoop City," sex worker Sheila sardonically affirms her self-worth in a riff on advice from a social worker to "make the most of your assets": "Sheila agrees. If you've got a great ass, show your ass." Dunnion's other protagonists are similarly resilient with yearnings that manifest as various levels of obsession. In "Now Is the Time to Light Fires," the ghost of the heroine's recently deceased lover keeps returning to rifle through drawers, eat, and sit idly in chairs. Cheeky irony is on full display here, as in "Oort Cloud Gets a Makeover," in which a woman takes stock of the big house she's rented a room in, particularly its customs and room rules: "Like a vampire, you have to be invited." Dunnion's indomitable heroines and wry prose make a refreshing tonic.
