Fiction. "Aimee Parkinson's stories always surprise us, telling of the search for elusive identities, the quest for slippery selves and for what it means to be human, a woman. An exciting and memorable new voice"--Robert Morgan, author of GAP CREEK. "These are stories both about the difficulty and the intense suddenness of human connection, about the profound link that exists between being in love and being alone"--Brian Evenson.

Woman with Dark Horses

Literature & Fiction

Parkison, Aimee

Literary

Starcherone Books

The twelve stories comprising Suburban Death Project sparkle with disturbing brilliance, revealing in full why Aimee Parkison is so widely celebrated for her innovative narratives and experimental fiction. Suburban Death Project breathes life into what is barely surviving: ill-fated families, frightening relationships, and dangerous loves. With a dark humor serving to make unimaginable traumas both tolerable and knowable, Parkison delves into marriage and mourning, lust and loss, and violence and its aftermath. She exposes the horrors of life in its bodily form and relieves them with a passionate wonder burning so brightly it outshines age, death, and family secrets. In average American households, families haunt each other while still alive as they recompose into dragonflies, peach trees, squirrels, ducks, owls, shadows, tunnels, and zoos of endangered species. Pinned to boards for study, peered at by voyeurs, videoed by neighbors, or vivisected for the greater good, each body in these riveting stories undergoes an unflinching examination.

Suburban Death Project

Genre Fiction

Unbound Edition Press

Winner of the FC2 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize  A darkly comical horror lurks beneath the surface of everyday events in Refrigerated Music for a Gleaming Woman, a seductively poetic story collection of unusual brilliance and rare humor.? In Aimee Parkison’s Refrigerated Music for a Gleaming Woman, lovers find unexpected romance in cramped spaces, fast food addicts struggle through cheeseburger addiction, and the splendor of nature competes with the violence of television. All the while, a complicated and precarious present dawns onto a new world where wealthy women wear children’s eyes as jewelry and those in need of money hawk their faces only to forever mourn what parts of themselves they have sold to survive.   Open the refrigerator door. Inside are antique jars. Open them to hear the music: Beethoven playing piano; slaves singing for freedom in plantation fields; mothers humming lullabies through the night to smallpox babies, knowing this song is the last sound their children will ever hear.   As Stephen Graham Jones notes in his foreword to this prize-winning collection, “The best books . . . fold you into a darkness sparkling with life. They lock you in the refrigerator but they also pipe in some music that never repeats, and when the door starts to open, you cling tight to it, so you can have just a few minutes more. This book, it’ll be over far too fast for you, yes. But even were it five times as thick as it is now, it would still be too short. Remember, though, the best books, they’re loops. They never stop. This one still hasn’t, for me.”

Refrigerated Music for a Gleaming Woman: Stories

United States

Fiction Collective 2

Sister Séance is set in Concord, Massachusetts, just after the Civil War. Spiritualism is sweeping the nation when a Halloween celebration calls for a traditional “dumb supper,” a dinner party where no guest may speak but must convey needs and desires through nonverbal communication. After the dumb supper, mysterious intruders shock the guests into confronting their pasts, uniting abolitionists, freed people, former slaveholders, a matchmaker, the single women who are her boarders, wounded Civil War veterans, and a female photographer pregnant with the child of her former slave.\nThis project was supported by an American Antiquarian Society William Randolph Hearst Creative Artist Fellowship.

Sister Séance

Kernpunkt Press

"Parkinson’s prose flows with a subtle, musical rhythm that only prose can achieve, and then rarely... Every sentence, every sentence, is exquisite."—Debrah Lechner, Hayden's Ferry Review
"Aimee Parkison most often begins softly, slowly stripping away each layer of social interaction to get at what is numinous and frightening and necessary about living in the real world. These are stories both about the difficulty and the intense suddenness of human connection, about the profound link that exists between being in love and being alone."Brian Evenson "Parkison is a storyteller, conjuring characters who harbor festering secrets, lurid urgencies, and violent compulsions. Like Joyce Carol Oates, Parkison deftly works the caricatures of Southern Gothicism into terrifying clarity.”Joseph Dewey, The Review of Contemporary Fiction 
From "The Glass Girl":
On certain evenings in dark motels, she could transform her lip into the edge of the bottle, imagining her face was made of amber glass and the men paused above her only to take a drink of breath. Over the years, men drank and drank until there were only two sips left inside. They began sucking the air out of the glass that grew warm in the wrong places because of heat radiating off their hands. The men's breath along with white feathers fell over autumn winds drifting through open windows.
In this collection, Kurt Vonnegut Fiction Prizewinner Aimee Parkison's characters struggle to understand what happens when the innocent party becomes the guilty party. With magical realist flair, secrets are aired with dirty laundry, but the stains never come clean. Carol Anshaw writes, "Aimee Parkison offers a distinct new voice to contemporary fiction. Her seductive stories explore childhood as a realm of sorrows, and reveal the afflictions of adults who emerge from this private geography."
Aimee Parkison has an MFA from Cornell University. She is associate professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where she teaches creative writing.

The Innocent Party (American Readers Series)

BOA Editions, Ltd.

The debut novel by an award-winning author of short stories. Kidnapped girls trapped in a remote theater surrounded by mountains and jungle are forced into illegal performances, displayed in cabinets with curiosities, delicate limbs bound by straps, accompanied by dancing puppets fashioned of dead children's bones. The Petals of Your Eyes conjures up a painful, poetic world that won't soon be forgotten.Aimee Parksion is an associate professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Parkison has received a Christopher Isherwood Fellowship, a Writers at Work Fellowship, and a Kurt Vonnegut Fiction Prize from North American Review. Her first collection, Woman with Dark Horses, won the Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction, judged by Cris Mazza. Parkison has an MFA in creative writing from Cornell University. She lives in Charlotte, North Carolina.

The Petals of Your Eyes

In Disappearing Debutantes, disappearing and ever present "female beginners" come-of-age in fantasy and reality. As children, girls, teens, "new adults," middle-aged women, and old women, they keep having their debuts and going unnoticed. Erased by gender, time, age, and those they most want to see them, neglected females become strange in hopes of being loved, being listened to, being understood, and being seen. Though society has no interest in allowing them to make a grand entrance on a life they keep trying to live anew, and though the bloom is long off the rose that never fully opened, each disappearing woman refuses to make a graceful exit or to blossom into the perfect flowery fem society wants her to become. Instead, she boldly celebrates her oddly transformative disappearance from a life that didn't go as planned by exploring a self-charted, self-made, surreal world of love, longing, lust, and lore.

Disappearing Debutantes

Pokrass, Meg

Outpost19

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