Out Now
The Girl Who
a novel in stories
Reviews
For I’ll Tell You a Love Story
“It is not often that reading a book makes me feel like a kid again. But that’s exactly what Couri Johnson’s debut short story collection, I’ll Tell You a Love Story, manages to achieve: a suspension of belief, that hunger to consume—more and more—pages curled beneath a comforter with a flashlight in hand.”
“Those looking for complicated narrative, multi-layered characters and stories, and a dose of the unbelievable along with emotions and thoughts they will recognize in themselves should pick this book up right now.”
For Feraltales
“Though Johnson’s takes feel more like overlays than full transformations, her prose evokes the timeless rhythms of folklore and the stories work even without familiarity with their referents. Balancing the timeless and the contemporary, Johnson’s latest is sure to win fans.”
For Love Breaks My Bones
“Let’s begin with a question. Have you ever tried to tell someone a story in the hopes that they stay? It doesn’t matter if it’s a lie or a promise, the end is usually the same: if you have to tell them a story, they have already gone.”
Book Reviews by Couri Johnson
Interested in having your book reviewed? Shoot me a message with the details and I’ll get back to you.
Edie on the Green Screen by Beth Lisick
Once upon the 1990s, Beth Lisick’s gritty, party-croaking narrator, Edie, was at the center of San Francisco’s artsy-weirdo-punk-party scene for no other reason than simply existing in that space, serving drinks, and understanding all the right references.
Kansastan by Farooq Ahmed
In his new novel Kansastan, Farooq Ahmed mixes dystopia with myth, the Old West with the Old Testament, and creates a narrative that is full of both humor and dread.
Difficulty Swallowing by Kym Cunningham
In her debut collection of autobiographical essays, Difficulty Swallowing, author Kym Cunningham takes on some of the world’s biggest and baddest systematic issues and finds a way to ground them in the personal, the concrete, and make them even more haunting as a result.
Heartland Calamitous by Michael Credico
In Michael Credico’s debut collection of short stories, Heartland Calamitous, he takes us from fever-dream to fever dream in a strange and fragmented Midwest.
Shapeshifting by Michelle Ross
When you hear a book is about motherhood, you might immediately imagine its filled with Hallmark Sentimentality, pedantic and often unrealistic advice about self-care and bonding, and overly archetypical depictions of women-as-natural-caregiver. This is not the case when it comes to Shapeshifting by Michelle Ross.
Velvet Hounds by Aime Seu
Aimee Seu’s debut collection of poetry Velvet Hounds took the Akron Poetry this year and its easy to see why. Seu crafts a beautiful balancing act through out the collection between high-poetic diction and visceral imagery, the body dissected and made whole again, the interplay between generational and personal trauma, and the sticky impact of past on present.
The Loneliness Pill by Dayana Stetco
Within the four plays readers will encounter a traveler, a mermaid, bureaucrats assigning lonely hearts pre-selected beaus, scientists and tarot readers, and frustrated writers conversing with literary constructs. The pieces in this collection are transparently influenced by the author’s life, a new turn for Stetco, in which she turned parts of herself into absurd, fantastic, and beautiful artifice.
The Poetry/Prose of Matthew Mahaney
These are reads that will evoke complicated emotions and questions within the reader, and ring bells close to home for anyone who tends to stray from the paths of what their society deems conventional thought patterns and experiences.
Once Read as Ruin by Katherine Gaffney
The collection walks between the margins of our conflicting desires to find love, to feel connected, and our animal need to unburden ourselves and live independently. These poems are not something, as the speaker in the first poem so beautifully states, that one can leave alone, and come back to without them having moved or changed in someway.
New Mythologies by Kym Cunningham
NEW MYTHOLOGIES is an apt name for this collection. Each poem resonates with the air of the eternal, and yet they resonate with the now, just as all good fairy tales and myths do. Anything is possible within these pages.