Summary

From a distance, Matthieu Chapman’s life and accomplishments serve as an example of racial progress in America: the first in his family to go to college, he earns two master’s degrees and a doctorate and then becomes a professor of theater. Despite his personal and academic success, however, the specter of antiblackness continues to haunt his every moment and interaction.

Told through fragments, facets, shards, slivers, splinters, and absences, Shattered places Chapman’s own story in dialogue with US history and structural analysis of race to relay the experience of being very alive in a demonstrably antiblack society—laying bare the impact of the American way on black bodies, black psyches, and black lives. From the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to the offices of higher education, from a Loyal White Knights flyer on his windshield to a play with black students written by a black playwright, Chapman’s life story embodies the resistance that occurs, the shattering, collapsing, and reconfiguring of being that happens in the collisions between conceptions of blackness. Shattered is a heartrending and thought-provoking challenge to narratives of racial progress and postracial America—an important reminder that systemic antiblack racism affects every black person regardless of what they achieve in spite of it.

Author

Matthieu Chapman is assistant professor of theater and head of theater studies at SUNY New Paltz. His writing has been published in Huffington Post and Pithead Chapel, among others. He holds degrees in theater and performance theory from San Diego State University, Mary Baldwin University, and University of California San Diego.

Reviews

“Every so often, a book comes along that changes the way we see, speak, and think about the world. Shattered is one of those books. Chapman’s relentless prose interweaves compelling narrative with groundbreaking critical race theory in an unflinching analysis of the day-to-day violence inflicted on black beings in an antiblack world. A must-read for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of race relations in America and answers to why black liberation remains deferred.”
Frank B. Wilderson III, author of Afropessimism and Incognegro

“I’m writing this while I’m back home in West Virginia visiting my mama, and I wish my pre-writer/professor black ass coulda read Matthieu Chapman’s Shattered as a teen because it woulda helped me navigate this complicated mess of growing up black in WV. Now, it’ll help me navigate this complicated mess of growing up black in this world. This important book is for everyone, and I hope all the young folks and old heads in any geography get a chance to read it. Thanks, homie.”  
Steven Dunn, author of Potted Meat

Excerpt

Author’s Note

Afropessimism.

Many find the name off-putting, depressing, defeatist—all reactions I had initially. But once I began to interrogate my own aversion to the label and began to truly engage with the nuances and diversity of thought within the field, I found things I had never experienced before.

Radical hope.
Radical creativity.
Radical self-determination.

Afropessimism is a field of theory that distinguishes antiblack racism from other forms of racism. As such, the problem of race for black people is not white supremacy—in which all nonwhite races suffer equally compared to whiteness—but rather the problem is antiblackness—in which all nonblacks maintain a structural position of human from which blacks are excluded. In other words, black people are nonhuman, and everyone else is human. The distinction is that under white supremacy, all nonwhite beings are positioned as subhuman—less than the full white subject—and therefore the suffering of nonwhite beings can be analogized. For example, with white supremacy, we can compare the suffering of the colonized Indian to the suffering of the immigrant Mexican. In Afropessimism, blackness is incompatible with the construction of the human, therefore blacks do not exist on the scale that would allow us to compare black suffering to human suffering. Afropessimism is not a critique of black people. Rather it is a critique of a world that needs black suffering and black death to maintain its own mental health.

Throughout this book, I use “black” in the lowercase. And only in the lowercase—even when starting a sentence. I used to oscillate between various constructions of “black” and “Black” to distinguish between a color and a Concept. “black”—black as night, black tar, coal-black. “Black”—Black people, Black being, Black death. But “Black” is not proper in this context because the concept of black in this book is not proper. This book is not about blackness that is sanitized and proper and resilient and hopeful. This book is about the blackness that survives despite its death, despite a world that continually kills us. This book is about blackness that, as La Marr Jurelle Bruce says, is “a critique of the proper . . . a blackness that is neither capitalized nor propertized via the protocols of Western grammar; a blackness that centers those who are typically regarded as lesser and lower cases.”1 It is a blackness that escapes what the world thinks of it and transcends any definitions I could give. I love the capital B, and I love those who use the capital B. But this book escapes designations of proper and improper. This book works beyond and between the anger and the rage and the joy and the love and the hope for a future and the hopelessness in the now. Nothing about this book is “proper,” most of all its exploration and expression of blackness.

This is not a book about black life or about living life as a black man. This is neither a book about being black nor about black being. This book is about the resistance that occurs, the shattering, collapsing, and reconfiguring of being that happens in the collisions between competing conceptions of blackness. This book is about the struggle between a free, unbridled, uncontainable blackness and the cage that the antiblack world has built for it.

This book is about living in a world of the dying.
This book is about being dead in the land of the living.
This book is about the tension between wholes and pieces in a world whose whole is built on my pieces.

As such, the story is in the whole, but the story is also in the pieces: fragments, facets, shards, slivers, splinters, absences.

• Fragments: Think of these as broader chapters that cover chunks of time.
• Facets: Each fragment contains multiple facets—the large pieces of a primarily linear narrative of my trials and tribulations in navigating the world of difference between my blackness and how the world perceives, engages, and violates my blackness. Each facet is required to see the whole. The facets in the narrative, while numbered beginning with one in each fragment, do not necessarily come in chronological order—the pieces never fall organized or neatly.
• Shards: Alongside the facets are various shards of story that have broken through time, space, and narrative to provide other experiences in my life that inform and enliven the facets.
• Slivers: Adjacent to the facets and shards are the smaller slivers of being that provide light, brief bits of history, and contexts through which to view the other pieces.
• Absences: But shattered objects are not defined solely by the pieces that scatter. The breaking produces negative spaces that define the separate parts of the former whole. These absences appear on the page as the unseeable that haunt and scandalize the whole.
• Splinter: And just when I thought I had collected all the pieces, I found that splinters remain missing. Tiny, nearly imperceptible spears of emotion and imagery that cannot be put into tidy paragraphs.

Absence
Status: The story you are reading is true.

This story is not about resistance and resilience in the face of white supremacy.
This story is not about overcoming obstacles and dismantling systemic racism.
The story is asking why black resistance and overcoming always seem to fall short of creating lasting change.
This story is asking how, despite the many political and social progresses of black people, we are still no closer to the mountaintop.
This story is questioning if we’ve been having the wrong conversations about how to change the world.
This story is about a world that needs antiblackness to function.
This story is about wandering the world of the living as a dead man.
This story is about surviving in death.
This story isn’t about changing that world.
This story is about destroying it.

Fragment 1

Facet: 1
Age: 11
Place: Uniontown, PA
Status: Dying

I had never actually heard the word in person. Sure, I had heard the word’s distant cousin, whose razor blade edges had been dulled by the softening of the hard r sound into “nigga,” on albums from the Wu-Tang Clan and Dr. Dre. But even in those cases, the force of the word was always mediated through layers of hi-fi and audiotape.

But here, in the flesh, the word was too real. The word became tangible. The hard r re-sharpened the blade. The blade grew wings, eyes, a mouth—the razors becoming talons on a monster that cut through the room toward me with velocity and violence. It caught my chest and ripped through my flesh, leaving a wound in my soul that would never and could never heal. A taste overcame my mouth: a blend of sour rancidness and ferric metal—a mix of bile and blood that rose from deep in the pit of my stomach.

It was the taste of hate.

Up until that moment, I didn’t know that hate had a taste.

Summary

A critic once wrote that Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon was about two things: Yugoslavia and everything else. Something similar might be said about Clear Creek. In this boundary-defying work, Erik Reece spends a year beside the stream in his rural Kentucky homeplace, tracking the movements of the seasons, the animals, and the thoughts passing through his mind.

Clear Creek is a series of vignettes that calls us out of our frenzied, digitized world to a slower, more contemplative way of being. Reece’s subjects range from solitude and solidarity to the intricacies of forest communities, and from the genius of songwriter Tom T. Hall to reforestation projects on abandoned strip mines. A work of close observation and carefully grounded insights, Clear Creek articulates a nature-based philosophy for pondering humanity’s current plight.

Author

Erik Reece is the author of five books of nonfiction, including Utopia Drive and Lost Mountain, which won Columbia University’s John B. Oakes Award for Environmental Journalism. He teaches writing and literature at the University of Kentucky.

Reviews

“Reece’s reflections on inner landscapes compared to outer landscapes and on the active life versus the contemplative life are compelling, as are his profound reflections on humanity’s place in the natural world.”
Foreword Reviews 

“Erik Reece is an important writer, and his deeply observed and well-researched natural history pulses back and forth with ideas. We need more books like this out in the world, books that give us hints for how to be in a time of crisis.”
David Gessner, author of Leave It as It Is: A Journey through Theodore Roosevelt’s American Wilderness

“A wise, rambling book that is equal parts memoir, natural history, and philosophical investigation. Erik Reece leads that rarest and most important of things, an examined life. Readers of Barry Lopez and Wendell Berry will find much to admire here.”
Joe Wilkins, author of Fall Back Down When I Die

“In Clear Creek, Erik Reece distinguishes between indoor philosophy and outdoor philosophy, as I myself distinguish between indoor books and outdoor books. Since Reece has bounced his ideas off stars and clouds, sunfish and jewelweed, herons, caterpillars, campfire flames, and his wild friends Whitman, Thoreau, and Epicurus, his book is altogether an outdoor book, full of starry, grassy, fiery ideas, and is itself a wild and wise new friend.”
Amy Leach, author of The Everybody Ensemble

Summary

Winner, 2025 Tennessee Book Award, Fiction

Told through alternating perspectives, God of River Mud chronicles the lives of Berna Minor, her husband, their four children, and Berna’s secret lover.

To escape a life of poverty and abuse, Berna Cannaday marries Zechariah Minor, a fundamentalist Baptist preacher, and commits herself to his faith, trying to make it her own. After Zechariah takes a church beside the Elk River in rural Clay, West Virginia, Berna falls in love with someone from their congregation—Jordan, a woman who has known since childhood that he was meant to be a man. Berna keeps her secret hidden as she struggles to be the wife and mother she believes God wants her to be. Berna and Zechariah’s children struggle as well, trying to reconcile the theology they are taught at home with the fast-changing world around them. And Jordan struggles to find a community and a life that allow him both to be safely and fully himself, as Jay, and to be loved for who he is.

As the decades and stories unfold, traditional evangelical Bible culture and the values of rural Appalachia clash against innate desires, LGBTQ identity, and gender orientation. Sympathies develop—sometimes unexpectedly—as the characters begin to reconcile their faith and their love. God of River Mud delves into the quandary of those marginalized and dehumanized within a religious patriarchy and grapples with the universal issues of identity, faith, love, and belonging.

Contents

Book One
Who Puts His Hand to the Plow
The Flesh Lusteth against  the Spirit
If the Son Hath Set You Free
Better to Marry Than to Burn
Old Things Are Passed Away
And the Spirit against the Flesh

Book Two
Behold All Things Are Become New
The Rod of Correction
Jordan River
A Prophet of the Most High
Whose Heart Is Snares and Nets
When You Pass through the Waters
They That Mourn
Ask and It Shall Be Given You

Book Three
Work Out Your Own Salvation
The Spirit, and the Water, and the Blood
As a Good Soldier
If a Man Devour You
The Household of God
In Due Season
At the Voice of the Bird
Yet the Sea Is Not Full

Acknowledgments

Author

Vic Sizemore is the author of the essay collection Goodbye, My Tribe: An Evangelical Exodus and the short story collection I Love You I’m Leaving. His writing has been published in StoryQuarterly, North American Review, Southern Humanities Review, storySouth, PANK Magazine, and many other journals.

Reviews

“A story of rural queerness that captures evangelicalism’s hold and the way it contributes to the struggles that LGBTQ+ Appalachians face. These characters’ lived experiences are unlike those we often read about in urban settings, yet their collective narratives ring clear: we all deserve to be our true selves.”
Savannah Sipple, author of WWJD and Other Poems
 
“Utterly unique, authentic, and engrossing.”
Sandra Scofield, author of Beyond Deserving
 
“God of River Mud is both a love story and a powerful indictment of evangelical religion.”
Julia Franks, author of Over the Plain Houses and The Say So 

Summary

2023 Weatherford Award Finalist, Nonfiction

How can the craft of musical instrument making help reconnect people to place and reenchant work in Appalachia? How does the sonic search for musical tone change relationships with trees and forests? Following three craftspeople in the mountain forests of Appalachia through their processes of making instruments, Finding the Singing Spruce considers the meanings of work, place, and creative expression in drawing music from wood.

Jasper Waugh-Quasebarth explores the complexities and contradictions of instrument-making labor, which is deeply rooted in mountain forests and expressive traditions but also engaged with global processes of production and consumption. Using historical narratives and sensory ethnography, among other approaches, he finds that the craft of lutherie speaks to the past, present, and future of the region’s work and nature.

Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction: “It Will Get in Your Blood”
1. West Virginia’s Musical Instrument Makers
2. Craft at Home in the Mountain Forest
3. A Red Spruce Guitar
4. Bringing Cremona Violins to Lobelia
5. Tonewood from the Old World and the New
Conclusion: Succession in Craft and Forest

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Author

Jasper Waugh-Quasebarth teaches folklore studies at the Ohio State University.

Reviews

“Finding the Singing Spruce is a nuanced academic contribution to both human and environmental Appalachian studies—but it is also a collection of accessible stories about people, places, and instruments. Waugh-Quasebarth’s experiences, ideas, and work will interest West Virginians, instrument makers, musicians, scholars from various fields of music and culture, and aficionados alike.”
—Aaron Allen, coeditor of Current Directions in Ecomusicology: Music, Culture, Nature

"An exemplary study for folklorists and anthropologists [which] also invites the general public into the complex world of instrument making."
—Mary Linscheid, West Virginia History: A Journal of Regional Studies

Summary

Young people will bear the brunt of the impacts of present and emerging crises occurring at all scales, from the national to the global. This volume brings together scholars and activists from various backgrounds to analyze youth interactions with law and politics, focusing specifically on the US legal landscape. It uses the lens of youth geographies to consider how legal and political systems shape our spaces, and provides leading-edge perspectives through case studies of child labor, compulsory education, asylum claims, criminalization of youth, youth activism, and more.

Of special interest in this volume is the tension between young people as both objects of law and policy and creative agents of change. Despite being directly affected by law and policy, young people are denied access to many legally sanctioned paths to shape them. Yet youth find ways to work within and mold the social, political, and legal spheres and set the stage for alternative futures.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction
Gloria Howerton and Leanne Purdum

Part 1: Attempts to Categorize and Manage Youth
1. Working and Schooling: A Critical Geography of Child Labor and Compulsory Education Laws in the Early Twentieth-Century United States
Meghan Cope

2. Protecting Youth: The Dismantling of Youth as a “Particular Social Group” in Contemporary Asylum Law
Kristina M. Campbell

3. “Met with the Full Prosecutorial Powers”: Zero-Tolerance Family Separations, Advocacy, and the Exceptionalism of the Child Asylum Seeker
Leanne Purdum

4. Understanding New York’s Opt-Out Movement: How School Segregation Shaped the Nation’s Largest Resistance to Standardized Testing
Olivia Ildefonso

Part 2: Youth Resistance and Resilience
5. The Coming of the Superpredators: Race, Policing, and Resistance to the Criminalization of Youth
Marsha Weissman, Glenn Rodriguez, and Evan Weissman

6. BreakOUT!: Queer and Trans of Color Activism in New Orleans
Krista L. Benson

7. Black Youth Resistance to Policies, Practices, and Dominant Narratives of the St. Louis Voluntary Desegregation Plan
Jerome E. Morris and Wanda F. McGowan

8. The Tribunal of the Future: Youth, Responsibility, and Temporal Justice in US Climate Change Litigation
Mark Ortiz

Contributors
Index

Editors

Gloria Howerton is an assistant professor in the department of geography and anthropology at the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire. Leanne Purdum is a visiting assistant professor in the law, politics, and society program at Drake University.

Reviews

“This volume is one of the only of its kind, and its engagement with geography, the law, and policy—while reframing children and childhood—stands to make many contributions and interventions in the field.”
Nicole Nguyen, author of A Curriculum of Fear: Homeland Security in US Public Schools

Summary

“Hardly a day passes without reference to some scandal, fraud, intellectual or moral failure, or other ill associated with American academic institutions,” writes Sol Gittleman in his bracing new book, An Accidental Triumph. “If American higher education is such a failure, why are students and scholars from all over the world still so eager to secure a place in one of these institutions? Is American higher education a disaster or the envy of the world?”

Gittleman confronts this contradiction in this dynamic mix of history, analysis, and personal reflection. An Accidental Triumph tells the engaging story of how American higher education evolved from a patchwork of seminaries in the early nineteenth century into the world’s leader in research by the middle of the twentieth. Gittleman links this fascinating story to his own fifty-year academic career, which coincided with an explosive rise in enrollment, spurred by the GI Bill, and an unparalleled postwar boom in faculty hiring, prompted by massive new federal support for academic research from organizations such as the National Science Foundation.

Writing with authority, frankness, and unfailing wry good humor, Gittleman surveys the triumphs, tragedies, and tensions of the history of American higher education. Despite the relentless criticism, Gittleman finds good reason to remain optimistic about the future of teaching and research at the college and university level in the United States. 

Contents

To come

Author

Sol Gittleman is the Alice and Nathan Gantcher University Professor Emeritus at Tufts University, where he taught from 1964 until his retirement in 2015. He served as provost from 1981 to 2002 and has received many awards, fellowships, and honorary degrees for his teaching and service. He is the author of six books, including An Entrepreneurial University.

Reviews

“There’s no more important story to be told at this moment in America then why higher education matters. And there’s no more adept and engaging storyteller than Sol Gittleman.” 
Larry Tye, New York Times bestselling author of Satchel and Demagogue

“An Accidental Triumph, Sol Gittleman’s ­fast-paced, highly personal history of American higher education, reflects his many years of leadership at Tufts University and his ability to weave together the relevant literature, from scholarly work to journalistic commentary. All who know Gittleman will recognize his distinctive voice and strongly held views. And all who care about academia will benefit from his sharp insights and passion as an educator.”

Richard Freeland, author of Academia’s Golden Age: Universities in Massachusetts, 1945–1970 and former President of Northeastern University
 
“A brief, spirited, thoroughly engaging account of the evolution of American higher education from its earliest origins in the fledging seminaries of the colonies to its world pre-eminence in the 21st century. Sol Gittleman crafts his account on the basis of deep immersion in the literature on higher education, liberally laced with his own perspectives from a half century of experience as a faculty member and provost at Tufts University. He is both a cheerleader for American colleges and universities and a realist about the ways in which American higher education has opened itself to a raft of critiques about its efficacy and integrity. Well worth a careful read.”

Nancy Weiss Malkiel, author of “Keep the Damned Women Out”
: The Struggle for Coeducation and professor of history emeritus at Princeton University
 
“Sol Gittleman is a gifted scholar, professor, and academic leader whose graceful book tells the many stories of continuity and conflict in the long history of American higher education. His critical eye and good humor are an effective combination to provide insightful accounts of exclusion and inequities along with an American consensus in creating our remarkable colleges and universities.”
John Thelin, author of A History of American Higher Education and university research professor at the University of Kentucky 
 
“An Accidental Triumph has charm. Sol Gittleman is a great storyteller and his book carries a personal touch. He has genuine affection for the institutions of which he writes and in which he has lived his life, even as he is clear-eyed about its checkered past.” 

Peter J. Dougherty, former Director, Princeton University Press

“Sol Gittleman’s grasp of history, his interpretive skills, and his sense of humor—all on prominent display in An Accidental Triumph—have convinced me that no one is better suited to tell this provocative story.”
Daniel Okrent, author of Last Call and The Guarded Gate

“An extraordinary accomplishment.” 
Jonathan Wilson, author of The Red Balcony and Fletcher Professor of Rhetoric and Debate Emeritus at Tufts University

Summary

The In-Betweens tells the story of a biracial boy becoming a man, all the while trying to find himself, trying to come to terms with his white family, and trying to find his place in American society. A rich narrative in the tradition of Justin Torres’s We the Animals and Bryan Washington’s Memorial, Davon Loeb’s memoir is relevant to the country’s current climate and is part of the necessary rewrite of the nation’s narrative and identity.

The son of a Black mother with deep family roots in Alabama and a white Jewish man from Long Island, Loeb grows up in a Black family in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey as one of the few nonwhite children in their suburban neighborhood. Despite his many and ongoing efforts to fit in, Loeb acutely feels his difference—he is singled out in class during Black History Month; his hair doesn’t conform to the latest fad; coaches and peers assume he is a talented athlete and dancer; and on the field trip to the Holocaust Museum, he is the Black Jew. But all is not struggle. In lyrical vignettes, Loeb vibrantly depicts the freedom, joys, and wonder of childhood; the awkwardness of teen years, first jobs, first passions. Loeb tells an individual story universally, and readers, regardless of subjectivity and relation, will see themselves throughout The In-Betweens.

Contents

A Love Story
On I-85 South
My Mother’s Mother
Bath Time
The Reconstruction of a Slave
At Church
Like Gladiators
Drinking a Colt 45
Throw the Football
A Roll of Duct Tape
Summer Thunderstorms
Aunt Sammy
Alabama Fire Ants 
Don’t Open the Door
The Settlers Inn
To Be a Man
Patricide and Boot Shines
With My Dad 
Fighting for the Tree
Weekend Weather
O. J. and the Wax Museum
Steve Urkel, Kick the Ball
Before Cell Phones
Between Walls at a Friend’s House
But I Am Not Toby
Thoughts on Hair
The Angels of the Paint
Suicide on the Triples
Shopping with Kris
The Jumps 
Not the Worst of Boys
5-Series BMW
A Back Seat and a Fire Pit
Morning Noise
Quitting Meant Back to Babysitting
After-School Basketball Game
The Best Dancer
The Black Jew
Something about Love
Visitations with My Father
For My Brother
Living in a Studio Apartment
The Makings of a Gym Rat 
In-Between Sirens
A Small Lesson on Loitering
On the Confederate Flag
Retirement

Acknowledgments

Author

Davon Loeb is an assistant features editor at The Rumpus. He earned an MFA in creative writing from Rutgers University–Camden and has had work published in Catapult, Ploughshares, Joyland, PANK, and elsewhere. He lives in New Jersey. Learn more at davonloeb.com.

Reviews

“Utterly captivating and resonant, The In-Betweens deserves a top spot on your bookshelf.”
Chicago Review of Books

“This gorgeously told 'lyrical memoir' recounts Loeb’s curious, difficult, joyous journey to find a place in the world in light of his Southern Black and Long Island-Jewish heritage.”
Philadelphia Inquirer

“Resonant. . . . Engagingly delivered, candid reflections on heritage and identity.”
Kirkus Reviews

“Ideal for those interested in descriptive, insightful stories about what it is like to not quite fit in anywhere, to inhabit many spaces at once, and to be challenged with the formation of one’s own identity in a sometimes chaotic and contradictory environment.”
Library Journal

“Loeb’s writ­ing is art­ful. . . . One must get to know Loeb slow­ly, one mem­o­ry at a time.”
Jewish Book Council

“Rich, evocative, and surprising.”
Marissa Higgins, Daily Kos

“While the memoir is masterfully told—Loeb employs a variety of craft techniques that have a powerful effect—what makes The In-Betweens so special is the thoughtfulness Loeb brings to his work.”
The Rumpus 

“[Loeb] dances to a slow, beautiful ballad on every page. His story will move any reader, but it’s the craft of his work that truly shines.” 
Debutiful

“With its keen attention to language and its moving portrayal of boyhood and belonging, The In-Betweens has earned its place alongside the greats of lyrical, coming-of-age nonfiction.” 
The Adroit Journal 

“Loeb’s debut memoir crackles with light, breaking open each superb chapter to uncover a memorable and gripping origin story.”
Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of World of Wonders

“Sentence to sentence, The In-Betweens is awake to the awe of being in a body and the danger of negotiating a culture that wants to drive space between us, inside us. Davon Loeb is writing to stay alive under the harshest conditions, and he has given us a brilliant, devastating book.”
Paul Lisicky, author of Later: My Life at the Edge of the World

“Confession, manifesto, bildungsroman, and prayer, The In-Betweens is a meditation on bruise and healing. Loeb’s struggles become snapshots of how transformation occurs even where shards have been piled, where one waits ‘for something to happen, like flashes of red and blue and sirens pulsing.’ A truly extraordinary new voice.”
Roy G. Guzmán, author of Catrachos

Summary

Populated with lovers who leave and return, with ghosts of the Holocaust and messages from the dead, Courtney Sender’s debut collection speaks in a singular new voice about the longings and loneliness of contemporary love. The world of these fourteen interlocking stories is fiercely real but suffused with magic and myth, dark wit, and distinct humor. Here, ancient loss works its way deep into the psyche of modern characters, stirring their unrelenting lust for life.

In “To Do With the Body,” the Museum of Period Clothes becomes the perfect setting for a bloody crime. In “Lilith in God’s Hands,” Adam’s first wife has an affair in the Garden of Eden. And in the title story, a woman spends her life waiting for any of the men who have left her to come back, only to find them all at her doorstep at once.

For readers of Elena Ferrante, Nicole Krauss, and Carmen Maria Machado, and for anyone who has known love and loneliness, In Other Lifetimes All I’ve Lost Comes Back to Me is a wise and sensual collection of old hauntings, new longings, and unexpected returns, with a finale that is a rousing call to the strength we each have, together or alone.

Hear the author read an excerpt from the title story.

Contents

In Other Lifetimes All I’ve Lost Comes Back To Me
Black Harness
For Somebody So Scared
Only Things We Say
Epistles
An Angel on Stilts
The Docent
I Am Going to Lose Everything I Have Ever Loved
Lilith in God’s Hands
To Lose Everything I Have Ever Loved
To Do With the Body
From Somebody So Scared
Missives
A New Story

Acknowledgments

Author

Courtney Sender’s writing has appeared in the New York Times’ Modern Love, the Atlantic, the Kenyon Review, American Short Fiction, and Tin House, among others. A MacDowell and Yaddo fellow, she holds an MFA from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars and an MTS from Harvard Divinity School. She currently lives in the Boston area.

Reviews

“Sender shifts between stories of love—between lovers, friends, family, ghosts—and the great looming shadow of the Holocaust, making a deep and howling portrait of longing and loneliness.”
Boston Globe

“Sender’s willingness to explore primal hurts makes her fiction compelling. . . . A distinctive debut from a promising author.”
Kirkus Reviews

“Sender’s intimate worlds explore the hollows of the real and imagined, bringing to life emotions and connections too unwieldy to define or restrain.”
Booklist

“A stunner from the very first page.”
Deesha Philyaw, author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, in the Millions

“A profound and deeply funny examination of loneliness in many of its forms.”
Emma Copley Eisenberg in Electric Lit

“This book is fierce. This book is rowdy. This book makes you think about all the relationships in your life that have not panned out as you might have hoped.”
Barrelhouse

“Brooding, poignant. . . . The sharp humor and imagination in these stories helps to temper the aching loneliness of people who are in various phases of losing, rejecting, or longing for love.”
Foreword Reviews

“Courtney Sender hooks us with her singular magic. . . . Brilliantly aching and haunting.”
Sara Lippmann, Lilith blog

“Sender matches the light topic of youthful lost love with the extreme heft of the Holocaust . . . and comes up with a miraculous balance between the personal and the universal.”
Ann Patchett, author of The Dutch House

“Wholly original, lyrical, fierce, these stories confound expectations at every turn. Courtney Sender writes about passion and loneliness, faith and longing, heaven and hell with a clear eye and a compassionate wit. This collection expands and celebrates, even as it sometimes upends, what it means to tell a love story.”
Alice McDermott, author of The Ninth Hour

“Courtney Sender’s stories are fierce and tender, exploring the urgency of desire, the restlessness of longing, and the way that both trauma and the will to survive can be a haunting inheritance. Sender moves gracefully between the surreal and the everyday, capturing the way romantic love can be at once impossibly strange and mercifully familiar.”
Danielle Evans, author of The Office of Historical Corrections

“Trust is the soul of these stories, and it flows both ways: the trust Courtney Sender has in her reader and the trust the reader feels deeply and truly in the hands of such a generous, intelligent, offbeat, singular writer. These stories, structured in an utterly original way, are rare and real; they get under your skin.”
Elisa Albert, author of Human Blues

“Reading these stories is like hearing a series of songs you love—the rhythm, the feeling, the physicality, the words! Literary rock ’n’ roll.”
Aimee Bender, author of The Butterfly Lampshade

Summary

The Wounds That Bind Us is the improbable true story of Kelley Shinn, an orphan at birth who loses her legs at the age of sixteen to a rare bacterial pathogen. She becomes an avid off-road racer and, as a single mother, attempts to drive around the globe in a Land Rover with her three-year-old daughter in tow to bring light to the plight of land mine survivors. With unflinching honesty, exceptional lyricism, and biting humor, Shinn (“that’s two Ns and no shins”) takes readers on a wild journey—literal and emotional—filled with striking characters and landscapes, heartbreaks, and hard-won insights, ultimately arriving at a place of profound redemption.

Told with the energy and intensity of the adventure story it is, this terrifically rich and nuanced examination of a life is also a careful meditation on renewal—a remapping of the world. Guided by the narrator’s keen introspection and her ability to look resolutely at harrowing sorrows and still find hope, joy, and meaning, The Wounds That Bind Us will resonate deeply, long after the last page.

Author

Kelley Shinn lives on Ocracoke, North Carolina, a remote island twenty-six miles from the coast. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Fourth Genre, Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, and elsewhere.

Reviews

“A harrowing memoir. . . . Readers may not want to follow in [Shinn’s] footsteps, but they will never be bored with her as a companion.”
Kirkus Reviews

“Simultaneously empowering and disconcerting. . . . Ultimately, one comes away from this book with an appreciation for the beauty of broken things.”
Southern Review of Books

“It is impossible to put down this book. The story of Kelley Shinn’s often dangerous but always thrilling and adventurous life will leave you breathless and awed. The courage, compassion, and joy with which Shinn lives her life is inspiring. She is the person every parent would want to see their child grow to be, the mother every kid wishes they had.”
Jessica Anya Blau, author of Mary Jane

“This memoir of single motherhood, disability, and an unlikely off-road adventure around the world delivers just what I’m looking for in my reading these days: courage. That, and fine writing, unforgettable characters, suspense, humor, tenderness, and a profound yet humble sense of moral purpose. Kelley Shinn is a marvel, and her book, despite its pain, makes a better world feel possible.”
Belle Boggs, author of The Art of Waiting: On Fertility, Medicine, and Motherhood

“The Wounds That Bind Us offers perennial relevance in a fresh literary manner. Kelley Shinn invites the reader, the voyeur, the accidental tourist into a world that is a brilliant jewel box of precise, complex, and beautiful turns, with language that bites and soothes the wound in the same stroke. These personal narratives, written with a deliberate genius of craft, usher an arresting memoir that lifts heavy veils and becomes bountiful succor for the parched truths we share.”
Jaki Shelton Green, North Carolina Poet Laureate

“A beautiful book about how the things we love are torn away from us and about the ways we hold on. Shinn is an anatomist of velocity. Thrilling.”
Thomas Beller, author of J.D. Salinger: The Escape Artist