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SNOWDOG

“Kim Chinquee is an American original” reports Ben Bradlee, Jr.  This is her fifth collection of flash fictions from Ravenna, and a true delight.

Read the interview with Kim Chinquee and Peter Ramos at Heavy Feather Review as well as their review by Naya Clark.  Also read Rachel Rueckert’s observations in The Literary Review

Also see the interview by Christina Deputa on Medium and, in Tupelo Quarterly, the interview with Kristina Marie Darling.

Reviews

Turn fifty. Name your dog Hazel. Order a fish sandwich. A dog that smells like peppermint. Imagine a queen. Watch the body deteriorate as if it's not your body. Repair what can almost be repaired. In these stories, Kim Chinquee evokes what it is to be in a place and then to continue on in that place, though not forever. The logic of damage is that harm is presented as an act of care. In these stories, this logic reverses itself, though not always, and not for everyone. "I'm not sure what she needs," says the narrator, "but I know she needs something." In the end, what that might be, and perhaps that's enough, is a dog "with magic breath." Be tender. Accept love in all its forms, animal to human, when and as it comes.

Bhanu Kapil

Also click here to see a fine review in LitPub!

To read Kim Chinquee’s work is to be startled, touched and affected. She is an American master of this flash form. As she works in small tight spaces; she packs in a world of family, friends, and guys, food, sex, weather, and always the sure and abiding love of dogs. And she's funny, spit-take funny.

Pia Ehrhardt, author of Famous Fathers and Now We Are Sixty

At once fiction and nonfiction, the miniature stories in Snowdog interlink to form a family album. In delicate, minimalist prose Kim Chinquee captures moments of piercing intensity between a human family and the dogs they live with. The aesthetic choice she makes again and again: Don’t flinch. Don’t look away. Not from a dog fight, not from lovers’ private words for sex, not from a painful exchange between a childless couple, not from the most vulnerable moment in a mother’s dreams. Shaped around a fictional character who is also her namesake, the protagonist in Snowdog turns to dogs for comfort as past and present blur. These stories accumulate like snow to form something quiet, solid, and altogether beautiful.
I just loved the book and feel grateful for the chance to read it! I just adopted a second dog so now I aspire to have four.

Carol Guess, author of Girl Zoo and With Animal

In SNOWDOG, Kim Chinquee scratches at the surface of the mundane to reveal the shimmering undercoat of the everyday. Beneath Chinquee’s simple prose is a network of charged observations about sex, relationships, family dynamics, and of course, dogs. The women of these flash fictions are independent, determined, and sometimes struggling: "I move a lot. I know what I want,” says one when she explains her habit of changing therapists. As overlapping protagonists juggle their conflicting desires for independence and companionship, their dogs remain constant and reliable vehicles for humor and reflection in this incisive and surprising book.

Rochelle Hurt, author of In Which I Play the Runaway and The Rusted City

If the pandemic has prompted us to contemplate the thresholds between chapters of our lives, then there is no better book for the moment than Kim Chinquee’s Snowdog. The evocative vignettes of this flash fiction collection—delightfully spare in their prose, yet generous in renderings of characters and places and the frictions between them—allow us to drift away from our ordinary, into moments of intense connection. This is a book for readers with dogs in their lives, and for those without, a companion at a moment when we all need a new way to stay warm.
Mary Biddinger, author of Partial Genius

Excerpt

COMPANION

 The stillness of the elevator makes its occupants grow silent. A woman with curved hands holding a stability ball squeezes herself into a corner. A man stands wringing his cap the color of a kidney. Another, who holds the leash of his furry companion, donned with a harness labeling him as service, looks up to the ceiling. A man with no legs in a wheelchair wears the same kind of jungle hat another woman (a veteran herself) recognizes, like the one on her son’s head in the picture he sent the day before, geared up in his flack vest, rifle on his chest, his face done up in black and green and brown. She says hello to the man. She looks at his eyes. She has so much to lose.