Auxiliary Skins

Existing somewhere in that chasm between bodily function and souled-ness, Christine Miscione's debut collection illumines all that is perilous, beautiful, and raw about being human and brings a new voice to contemporary literature. From the surgically gutted and the racially transformed to the story of self-excision that won the Vanderbilt/Exile Award for short fiction, this anthology is chock-full of razor blades masquerading as lemon tarts and everything in between. The writing and its use of imagery and language is innovative and calls into question the definition of a short story by challenging previous notions of the convention in terms of length, style, and plot. Inventive, assured, and accessible, the stories pair emotional depth with great technical skills and peel back layers to reveal the strange, the wondrous, and the unexpected. This provocative collection reimagines ideas of the body, the world, interiority, and relationships with the self and with others through a satiric approach, indelibly marked by wit, humor, irony, playfulness, irreverent analysis, and comic existentialism.