The Emily Fables

In The Emily Fables, Dickinson’s writing changes the body/the being of anyone tough enough to read what she writes, how it makes that person gasp, makes that person's throat catch, heart skip skip a beat as word after word she nails something that has never before been nailed.

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Praise for The Emily Fables

All of Stephanie Dickinson’s works are about language: taut, urgent, effervescent. Her extraordinary talent shimmies in the daylight of her paged ruminations, in the night of her haunting revelations. Reading Stephanie Dickinson is like being thrown back in time to a more careful, more erudite, era of writing rising off the wings of a brilliance seldom seen these days; maybe it’s because her “Emily” pieces speak of that gentler time. Yet next to Annie Dillard, I’m not sure I’ve met Dickinson’s contemporary equal. Her works are all about the lucid, arresting turns of phrase that make language as surprising and re-readable as it should be.

—Chila Woychik, essayist and editor of Eastern Iowa Review

In The Emily Fables, Dickinson’s writing changes the body/the being of anyone tough enough to read what she writes, how it makes that person gasp, makes that person’s throat catch, heart skip skip a beat as word after word she nails something that has never before been nailed. She discovers for the reader something that before had no existence on the map of daily human beings and marks it out as a new a roadway. There Dickinson is, machete in hand, pick on the ground beside her, cutting a trail, digging out a byway, pointing out landmark after landmark along the way.

—Allen Brafman, author of Stone Feathers

Danger is always palpably present in The Emily Fables. It travels with us as we follow Emily’s journey that geographically takes us no farther than the four corners of an Iowa farm. It is the un-nerving that we can’t shake. Sometimes we feel it is a spirit that lives within the narrator, a dybuk, that shares her mind, strums her emotions with its willful dissonances. It is a lyrical trip with a fallen angel and we wonder how she came to fall.

—Rosemary De Angelis, Director, New York Drama Desk Award Winning Actress

About the Author

Stephanie Dickinson, an Iowa native, lives in New York City. Her novel Half Girl (winner of the Hackney Award) and novella Lust Series are published by Spuyten Duyvil, as is her just-released novel Love Highway, based on the 2006 Jennifer Moore murder. Her other books are Corn Goddess (poetry), Road of Five Churches (stories), and Port Authority Orchids (a novel-in-stories for young adults). Her writing appears in Hotel Amerika, Mudfish, The Dirty Goat, Cream City Review, Mid-American Review, Fourteen Hills, Green Mountains Review, Quiddity, Fjords, Water-Stone Review, Gargoyle, Rhino, and Willow Springs, among others. Her story “A Lynching in Stereoscope” was reprinted in Best American Nonrequired Reading. “Love City” and “Lucky Seven and Dalloway” were chosen for inclusion in New Stories from the South, the Year’s Best 2008 and 2009. Awarded a NYFA grant for fiction, she is also the winner of New Delta Review’s 2011 Matt Clark Fiction prize judged by Susan Straight for “Between the Cold Hearts and Blue Dudes.” Heat: An Interview with Jean Seberg, was released in 2013 by New Michigan Press. Her work has received multiple distinguished story citations in the Pushcart Anthology, Best American Short Stories, and Best American Mysteries. She is an associate editor at Mudfish as well as a member of Jill Hoffman’s glass table writing workshop. Along with her partner, Rob Cook, she edits Skidrow Penthouse.

The Emily Fables

Praise for The Emily Fables

About the Author

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