Advance Praise for A Girl Goes Into the Forest
“In these wistful, expansive stories, Peg Alford Pursell holds up a mirror to our lives and relationships. The stories excavate the lives of her narrators with honesty and clear, luminous prose. They are mysterious in the way the best fiction is—their truths echoing long after you turn the page.”
—Karen E. Bender, National Book Award finalist and author of Refund
"The stories in A GIRL GOES INTO THE FOREST are as beautiful and fine as a string of pearls and as complex as a thousand-piece puzzle. Each one is like a doorway through which we glimpse an entire universe."
—Ramona Ausubel, author of Awayland and Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty
"A GIRL GOES INTO THE FOREST is nominally a collection of stories, but in its thrilling and original presentation, the book defies categorization. Pursell is a writer of precise and gorgeously riveting images, and her sentences shimmer with the spaciousness and lyricism of poetry. Reading these tales is to be drawn into worlds that feel at once recognizable and mythic. The effect is transporting."
-Marisa Silver, author of Little Nothing and Mary Coin
"In seventy-eight viscerally powerful stories, Pursell masterfully reinvents the contemporary terrors and wonders that have faced the runaways and the revenants in our oldest tales. Passage by amazing passage, these interrelated stories capture the desiring and sorrowing and believing that can become threatening and then harmless and, at last, fatal. A spellbinding world."
-Kevin McIlvoy, author of The Complete History of New Mexico and Other Stories
“The ordinary lives of parents, daughters, husbands, wives, illness and grief are transformed in Pursell’s second collection, A GIRL GOES INTO THE FOREST. Here, the lucky reader enters a 'forest' brimming with enchantments, daily life turned transcendent and strange, but no less moving. Assembled like a luminous mosaic of stained glass, these seventy-eight tales read like prose poems—a pitch-perfect condensation of moments, inflected by Pursell’s uncanny ear for the lyric. A wonder of a book!”
-Karen Brennan, author of Monsters
"A GIRL GOES INTO THE FOREST runs like a collection of melted fairy tales in which archetypes of gender and culture are warped and subverted in the crucible of Pursell’s formidable intellect. These are stories of a variety that Joy Williams would recognize, tales broken all to pieces and hidden away in a weird apothecary. Pull open a drawer. See what hides within."
—Christian Kiefer, author of Phantoms
2019-05-02
A collection of short stories and microfictions that investigate the flash points in people's lives—the places where decisions turn into consequences—through the lens of the girls in the fairy tales.
Pursell (Show Her a Flower, a Bird, a Shadow, 2017) is a master of the atmospheric moment. In these 78 very short stories, some of which are only a paragraph long, a shift in the light, a stray sound, a familiar gesture made suddenly strange are the vertices on which the characters' psyches balance. The women we encounter herein are mothers of grown, absent, precarious, and endangered daughters. They are lovers to distant, brittle, sometimes-brutal, often untranslatable men. They are daughters to stricken mothers, beloved in their exits, baffling in their frosty disinterest. Unlike a traditional fairy tale, where the plot hinges on a vulnerable character's quest into the unknown against all advice, these stories could be categorized as ones in which nothing much happens. Yet, to ignore the depths of engagement Pursell manages to invest in the look that passes between aging parents, the smell of a daughter's shampoo, the "airy bell" of an unattainable lover's gypsy skirt "ringing around her hips," would be a peril of a different sort. Precise, delicate, yet bloody-minded in their refusal to look away from the most painful moments of our tender lives, Pursell's stories shine brightest where they allow themselves to dwell undisturbed in their instants. The collection as a whole suffers from some muddiness due to the sheer number of these moments, which inevitably include duplications of vantage and image. This encourages the reader to look for an underlying narrative pattern that does not quite materialize; yet, the joys of the individual stories sparkle so winsomely it is easy to ignore this quibble as we push forward, eagerly, into the forest ahead.
Tiny tales that resonate far beyond their borders to remind us that, with the right kind of attention, "beast, bird, botany, being—all [are] knowable."
