You Are the Snake
Stories
-
- $12.99
-
- $12.99
Publisher Description
From the celebrated author of Juliet the Maniac comes a collection of previously unpublished stories concerned with girlhood, family, and urge, reminiscent of Mary Gaitskill and Laura van den Berg
In You Are the Snake, we peer into the life of a community college student, the life of an abusive grandmother is imagined, and a young woman takes up gardening. Escoria’s characters are trying their best, or they aren't, as they bump against the boundaries of society's expectations.
Exploiting the form of the short story in a voice entirely her own, You Are the Snake resists easy moralizing by subverting our expectations of how narrative functions. While Escoria plumbs the depth of girlhood and new womanhood, she leaves room for oddness, impulse, and yearning. Each story contains its own world, be it the suburbs of California or the mountains of West Virginia, but taken as a whole, this collection is expanding and challenging, corrupting expectations about what women can be and what they can write.
Juliet Escoria’s writing has been called “vivid,” “fantastic,” “sharp,” and “singularly honest,” and this collection delivers the “charged eloquence” of her previous work, in addition to the maturity and style of a new format—the short story—which is a dream fit for her “electricity that pulsates from within the prose.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The suffocating ennui of girlhood and early womanhood pervades this subtly subversive collection from Escoria (Juliet the Maniac). In "Dust Particles," girls bond over Ninja Turtles rather than Barbies, and in "Pluck It Out," they wear Doc Martens with pleated skirts. Often, Escoria focuses on the volatile friendship dynamics between women who jeer at societal expectations under the influence of alcohol. The unnamed narrator of "Hot Girl" recounts how her former best friend—who looked "feral... even when she was happy"—got away with attempted murder, thanks to the hold she exerted on both men and women. In "Roadkill," a group of college-age women, each bearing the weight of unacknowledged trauma, run amok one summer, devising cruel games that culminate in a terrifying assault on a young man. "State of Emergency" finds an unhappy young couple forced to continue living together in a difficult rental market ("I had... a desire to tell him he was stupid. But what did it matter?"). Even when not much happens, Escoria vividly captures her characters' shared worlds. These charged and often startling stories hit hard.
