Verge
Stories
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
LONGLISTED FOR THE STORY PRIZE
Named one of the Best Books of the Year by Bustle and Lit Hub
A fiercely empathetic group portrait of the marginalized and outcast in moments of crisis, from one of the most galvanizing voices in American fiction.
Lidia Yuknavitch is a writer of rare insight into the jagged boundaries between pain and survival. Her characters are scarred by the unchecked hungers of others and themselves, yet determined to find salvation within lives that can feel beyond their control. In novels such as The Small Backs of Children and The Book of Joan, she has captivated readers with stories of visceral power. Now, in Verge, she offers a shard-sharp mosaic portrait of human resilience on the margins.
The landscape of Verge is peopled with characters who are innocent and imperfect, wise and endangered: an eight-year-old black-market medical courier, a restless lover haunted by memories of his mother, a teenage girl gazing out her attic window at a nearby prison, all of them wounded but grasping toward transcendence. Clear-eyed yet inspiring, Verge challenges us with moments of uncomfortable truth, even as it urges us to place our faith not in the flimsy guardrails of society but in the memories held—and told—by our own individual bodies.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this brilliant collection, Yuknavitch (The Book of Joan) chronicles people outside society's margins. In "Cusp," a teenager in rural Texas comes of age while acting as a drug mule at a prison. "The Organ Runner" follows a young girl as she works to ferry kidneys for illegal backroom transplants, while "Second Language" deals with sex trafficking in Portland, Ore. In "A Woman Refusing," a frustrated ex-husband refuses to aid his former spouse, who stands nude atop a high-rise, threatening to jump. The incest-tinged "Second Coming" describes an at-home artificial insemination involving a sexually naive woman and her married sister. In "Mechanics," a woman flirts with a potential new lover while working under the hood of her car. The stories are consistently incisive, with sharp sentences and a barreling pace. The subject matter is pretty dark stuff, but Yuknavitch does offer an occasional ray of hope or rallying cry of resilience for her characters trapped by addiction, forced sex work, or bad marriages. This riveting collection invites readers to see women whose points of view are typically ignored.
