A Jellyfish for Every Name

David Rawson’s A Jellyfish for Every Name is a collection of short stories that almost connect to each other, sharing characters and images that resonate throughout. The characters in these stories are also attempting to connect (through family, relationships, religion, science, and history) but are failing.

Two women communicating through an alligator puppet, a man’s ex girlfriends dying on their way to buy Alfred Hitchcock memorabilia after he introduced them to his movies, a son reading his father’s field guide to North American flowers alone in an attic, a mother taking her son to a circus neither wants to go to, God sleeping inside the body of Moses on the moon — this is a world where people are haunted by the past and by the permanent mark one person leaves on another.

Out of Stock

Praise for A Jellyfish for Every Name

David Rawson’s A Jellyfish for Every Name beautifully blends the quotidian with the mythic to create a collection of linked short stories that connect our everyday selves to the sublime. Masterfully written, and even more masterfully conceived, this is a must-read.

-Sarah Einstein, managing editor of Brevity

Beneath the blanket of beautifully crafted sentences of A Jellyfish for Every Name, David Rawson has constructed an intricate framework of symbolism and science in which young Moses Friedman’s longing for knowledge and human connection is palpable from story one. “The ocean is not a womb. The mouth is not an ocean. The mouth is not a womb,” becomes a mantra for ordering the world, the body, intimacy. The collection culminates in a cerebral masterpiece, the images of which will haunt the reader perhaps forever.

-Megan Hudgins, author of Crixa

David Rawson is an incantatory young writer whose stories are more like summons, bent radio signals from the old weird America to the new. His most recent chapbook—A Jellyfish for Every Name—stirs up what’s left of America’s sad magic, and it shakes the reader, as if to say: together, we can still make it to the Moon.

-Joel E. R. Smith, author of The Parish and fiction editor with Spork Press

David Rawson writes fractured stories and fractured lives – and from the fissures and breaks like a different kind of light. It’s sad and it’s beautiful and it’s a voice I’ve never quite heard before.”

—Amber Sparks, author of May We Shed These Human Bodies

About the Author

David Rawson’s short stories, poems, and reviews published in various journals such as The Monarch Review, Monkeybicycle, Prick of the Spindle, and Spork. He was nominated for a Pushcart for a poem which appeared in Mixed Fruit. His journalism has appeared in the Johnston City Herald and the Carterville Courier in Southern Illinois. David is also the author of F***head, available from Punctum Books. More info on the book here. Much of David’s work is about the interconnectedness of family, faith, science, and disability. He is currently working on his first novel. Reach out to David @ davidallenrawson@gmail.com or visit his website

A Jellyfish for Every Name

Praise for A Jellyfish for Every Name

About the Author

Discover more from ELJ Editions