Fruiting Bodies: Stories
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4.5 • 4 Ratings
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- $21.99
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
Finalist for the 2023 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction
One of Vulture's Best Books of the Year
This genre-bending debut collection of stories constructs eight eerie worlds full of desire, wisdom, and magic blooming amidst decay.
In stories that beckon and haunt, Fruiting Bodies ranges confidently from the fantastical to the gothic to the uncanny as it follows characters—mostly queer, mostly women—on the precipice of change. Echoes of timeless myth and folklore reverberate through urgent narratives of discovery, appetite, and coming-of-age in a time of crisis.
In “The Changeling,” two young cousins wait in dread for a new family member to arrive, convinced that he may be a dangerous supernatural creature. In “Endangered Animals,” Jane prepares to say goodbye to her almost-love while they road-trip across a country irrevocably altered by climate change. In “Take Only What Belongs to You,” a queer woman struggles with the personal history of an author she idolized, while in “Fiddler, Fool, Pair,” an anthropologist is drawn into a magical—and dangerous—gamble. In the title story, partners Agnes and Geb feast peacefully on the mushrooms that sprout from Agnes’s body—until an unwanted male guest disturbs their cloistered home.
Audacious, striking, and wholly original, Fruiting Bodies offers stories about knowledge in a world on the verge of collapse, knowledge that alternately empowers or devastates. Pulling beautifully, brazenly, from a variety of literary traditions, Kathryn Harlan firmly establishes herself as a thrilling new voice in fiction.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Harlan's enticing debut collection, primarily queer, female characters encounter surreal and fantastical situations. In the title story, the protagonist's lover becomes mysteriously mycological, sprouting various types of mushrooms the partners can cook and enjoy—or use to poison an unwitting, uninvited guest. In the tense "The Changeling," two cousins kidnap the main character's aunt's hard-won "miracle baby," fearing he is a demonic doppelgänger. "Endangered Animals" involves a road trip with two young women who share ambiguous and unpredictable feelings for each other. The story is set against a backdrop of the effects of climate change, and it offers a surprising twist. In another standout, "Is This You?," Maura is visited by versions of her former selves at various ages as her mother writes about Maura's life, including a period of self-harm during Maura's adolescence. Harlan's prose is beautiful and vivid, and each story has elements of beauty and horror, evocative of, as the narrator of "Algal Bloom" puts it, "nothing I had words for, like the end of the world." As that story's protagonist defies the warnings against swimming in a potentially lethal pond, Harlan captures the essence of the collection: much splendor and quite a bit of squirm. This is well worth diving into.
