Shot Girls
by Kim Chinquee

Description

This new work (2018) from Kim Chinquee is a collection of flash and short stories, gripping and gritty tales of life, love, and our common humanity.  “Kim Chinquee writes tenderly about tough women—soldiers, cops, survivors of violence—and brings a fierce empathy and lyricism to these stories of hardscrabble lives. Shot Girls is a remarkable collection; Chinquee is an important and necessary writer for these times.”—Dan Chaon, author of Ill Will and Stay Awake

Comments:

“The girls and women breathing through Chinquee’s pages grapple with the casual cruelty of lovers, parents, and a soul-shattering culture. Hands may be calloused and hearts broken, but pervading every bracing, beautifully crafted sentence is a quiet, insistent strength. These are women you know (maybe yourself) and Shot Girls is an unsentimental declaration: Here I am. See me.” (Dawn Raffel, author of The Secret Life of Objects and Carrying the Body)

“Kim Chinquee’s Shot Girls flings you into the jittery lives of women and menacing men, of women on the brink of disaster or anomic drift, the stink of smoke and drink, of bad or so-so sex wafting all around. Alternating between lapidary flashes and short fictions that read like novels, Shot Girls is a sledgehammer strike against patriarchy. Chinquee’s deftly drawn dreamers and schemers, drifters and grifters, and gone nuclear families are living, loving, and lying in American pre-fab, its sordid bars and motels, empty parking lots, imposing offices, cold hospitals, and strangling military strongholds. Keenly observed and deeply affecting, Shot Girls is a marvelous haunting, its author a master of loneliness, beauty, desire, sadness, loss.” (John Madera, The Big Other)

“Beautifully honed stories about lives on the verge of free fall.  Shot Girls is merciless in its frank depiction of the way our messy lives careen off one another, bruising everyone they touch. These are the stories that Raymond Carver might have written if he’d grown up female, was from the midwest, joined the military, and lived into the 21st century.” (Brian Evenson, A Collapse of Horses and What We Talk About When We Talk About Love: Bookmarked)