EMILY GEMINDER READS FROM HER DEBUT COLLECTION DEAD GIRLS AND OTHER STORIES WITH BRANDI WELLS

Dead Girls and Other Stories (Dzanc Books)

With lyric artistry and emotional force, Emily Geminder’s debut collection charts a vivid constellation of characters fleeing their own stories. A teenage runaway and her mute brother seek salvation in houses, buses, the backseats of cars. Preteen girls dial up the ghosts of fat girls. A crew of bomber pilots addresses the ash of villagers below. And from India to New York to Phnom Penh, dead girls both real and fantastic appear again and again: as obsession, as threat, as national myth and collective nightmare.

Praise for Dead Girls 

“An eerie convergence of female identities and experiences across time and space. [...] Startling, far-reaching tales of women who haunt and are haunted.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

“Geminder’s stories are refreshing, surprising, and evocative.”—Publisher's Weekly

“Geminder showcases an acute sensitivity to worlds both inside and out. There’s real delicacy to the craft but underneath all the skill is a shaking sense of purpose, and a great love of the brokenness and beauty of humanity. This is a substantive, memorable debut.”—Aimee Bender, author of The Color Master and The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

“An electrifying read. Written in dreamy prose, these stories take the world we know and turn it inside out, making us question everything we think we know about our places in it. But don’t let the dream-like quality fool you: These stories have teeth. Seductive but fierce, full of keen insights and tenacious questions, Geminder’s fearless and utterly original debut collection will haunt and nourish you.”—Dana Johnson, author of In the Not Quite Dark and Elsewhere, California

“The stories in Geminder’s mesmerizing Dead Girls seamlessly weave gender and geopolitics and the dreamlike worlds of characters struggling to find hope and reason within their near apocalypses. The thread of unease that runs through the collection is insightful, rebellious, and righteous.”—Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts and Disappearance at Devil’s Rock

“Emily Geminder’s stirring collection explores death-haunted scenarios from unexpected angles. Whether the characters are caught in the currents of Cambodian history or the private mythologies of an American summer, they’re often plunged into moments that dissolve all certainties about identity, consciousness, and the body. Etched with a matter-of-fact lyricism, Dead Girls will haunt you, sure, but that’s barely half the story.”—Jeff Jackson, author of Mira Corpora

Emily Geminder’s short stories, poems, and essays have appeared in AGNI, American Short Fiction, Mississippi Review, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, Tin House Open Bar, Witness, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of an AWP Intro Journals Award and a Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award, and her work was noted in Best American Essays 2016. She has worked as a journalist in New York and Cambodia, and is a Provost’s Fellow in creative writing and literature at the University of Southern California.

Brandi Wells is the author of This Boring Apocalypse (Civil Coping Mechanisms), Please Don’t Be Upset (Tiny Hardcore Press), and Poisonhorse (Dzanc Books). Her writing appears in Denver Quarterly, Sycamore Review, Paper Darts, Folio, Chicago Review and other journals. She has an MFA in creative writing from the University of Alabama, where she served as editor of the Black Warrior Review.