Homesick
Stories
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Dark, irreverent, and truly innovative, the speculative stories in Homesick meditate on the theme of home and our estrangement from it, and what happens when the familiar suddenly shifts into the uncanny. In stories that foreground queer relationships and transgender or nonbinary characters, Cipri delivers the origin story for a superhero team comprised of murdered girls; a housecleaner discovering an impossible ocean in her least-favorite clients’ house; a man haunted by keys that appear suddenly in his throat; and a team of scientists and activists discovering the remains of a long-extinct species of intelligent weasels.
In the spirit of Laura van den Berg, Emily Geminder, Chaya Bhuvaneswar, and other winners of the Dzanc Short Story Collection Prize, Nino Cipri’s debut collection announces the arrival of a brilliant and wonderfully unpredictable writer with a gift for turning the short story on its ear.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
PW reviewer Cipri's patchwork debut SF collection brings together nine stories about people, most of whom fall somewhere under the LGBTQ umbrella, struggling to connect with one another in bizarre circumstances. Other than that theme, the works have little in common. Some play with form: "Which Super Little Dead Girl Are You?" is a creepy Buzzfeed-style quiz that snarkily reveals the details of four girls' gruesome murders, and "Dead Air" is a terrifying found-footage thriller about a lesbian who audiotapes her relationships. Two character-driven epistolary stories, "Let Down, Set Free" and "The Shape of My Name," respectively feature a divorcee riding a flying tree and a transmasculine time traveler who's trying to better understand his estranged mother's choices. In "Not an Ocean but the Sea," a disgruntled housekeeper finds an ocean hidden under furniture. "Presque Vu" chronicles a lonely gay ride-share driver living through an apocalypse. Vibrant characters ground the well-written stories. The collection's diversity is both a strength and a weakness; there's something for everyone, but few people are likely to love it in its entirety.
