Author(s): Lidia Yuknavitch

Short Stories

Verge offers a shard-sharp mosaic portrait of human resilience on the margins. The landscape of Verge is peopled with characters who are innocent and imperfect, wise and endangered- an eight-year-old black-market medical courier, a restless lover haunted by memories of his mother, a teenage girl gazing out her attic window at a nearby prison, all of them wounded but grasping toward transcendence. Clear-eyed yet inspiring, Verge challenges us with moments of uncomfortable truth, even as it urges us to place our faith not in the flimsy guardrails of society but in the memories held-and told-by our own individual bodies.

Review: Praise for Verge:
"The powers of her prose [are] on full, incandescent display. . . . The damaged beauty of these misfits keeps the reader leaning in. " -Nicholas Mancusi, TIME
"Children harvest organs, janitors build magical worlds, and mourning lovers drive to destinations unknown in this searing, precise collection of short stories." -Vogue
"Bracing [and] profound." -Entertainment Weekly
"At several points while reading Verge, I found myself curled into a ball, my fingers gripping the pages so tightly they almost tore the paper. It was as if the words had crawled off the page and under my skin." -Cornelia Channing, The Paris Review
"Full of suspense . . . Young or old, male or female, the characters in Verge will shock and impress themselves onto the reader." -LitHub
"Yuknavitch's writing is as sharp as ever and her empathetic takes on the grief, trauma, and beauty of marginalized souls are as precise as they are gripping. This is a book that lingers." -Refinery29
"This book is a gem. . . . A brilliant collection of twenty stories that contain as much compassion as suffering . . . In Yuknavitch's hands, words are both swords and feathers. . . . She writes with a sensibility that is both blunt and empathic, as if to open the reader's heart and make it bleed." -Ms. Magazine
"Diverse and impactful, unlike some collections, where only a few stories shine . . . Verge boldly asks some pressing yet unspoken questions, such as: How is it that Americans can say anything with a straight face? Does it hurt more to keep the secrets or tell them? It also forces us to acknowledge-and even embrace-the unsettling answers." -San Francisco Chronicle
"Yuknavitch is one of the most celebrated contemporary writers. [Now she] returns with a collection of short stories that embody her unique blend of the unsettling and the delightful." -Electric Literature
"Dynamite. . . . I don't know of any other writer who can render the brutality of life with such honesty and dazzle. . . . That Lidia Yuknavitch can create such beauty out of the tragedy of contemporary life is testament to her skill as an artist. Verge is volatile and vital, and it hits where it hurts, in the most oddly pleasurable way." -Lambda Literary
"Yuknavitch writes with rare empathy about the repercussions of grief, loss and dislocation." -Jane Ciabattari, BBC Culture
"Disturbing and delightful all at once." -BookRiot

Author Biography: Lidia Yuknavitch is the nationally bestselling author of the novels The Book of Joan, The Small Backs of Children, and Dora- A Headcase, and of the memoir The Chronology of Water. She is the recipient of two Oregon Book Awards and has been a finalist for the Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize and the PEN Center USA Creative Nonfiction Award. She lives in Portland, Oregon