Aimee Parkison

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In Disappearing Debutantes, disappearing and ever present "female beginners" come-of-age in fantasy and reality. As children, girls, teens, "new adults," middle-aged women, and old women, they keep having their debuts and going unnoticed. Erased by gender, time, age, and those they most want to see them, neglected females become strange in hopes of being loved, being listened to, being understood, and being seen. Though society has no interest in allowing them to make a grand entrance on a life they keep trying to live anew, and though the bloom is long off the rose that never fully opened, each disappearing woman refuses to make a graceful exit or to blossom into the perfect flowery fem society wants her to become. Instead, she boldly celebrates her oddly transformative disappearance from a life that didn't go as planned by exploring a self-charted, self-made, surreal world of love, longing, lust, and lore.

Sister S ance is set in Concord, Massachusetts, just after the Civil War. Spiritualism is sweeping the nation when a Halloween celebration calls for a traditional "dumb supper," a dinner party where no guest may speak but must convey needs and desires through nonverbal communication. After the dumb supper, mysterious intruders shock the guests into confronting their pasts, uniting abolitionists, freed people, former slaveholders, a matchmaker, the single women who are her boarders, wounded Civil War veterans, and a female photographer pregnant with the child of her former slave. This project was supported by an American Antiquarian Society William Randolph Hearst Creative Artist Fellowship.

A dark yet playful collection of short stories that pushes boundaries and blurs the lines between the real and surreal. Girl Zoo is an enthralling and sometimes unsettling collection of short stories that examines how women in society are confined by the limitations and expectations of pop culture, politics, advertising, fashion, myth, and romance. In each story, a woman or girl is literally confined or held captive, and we can only watch as they are transformed into objects of terror and desire, plotting their escape from their cultural cages. Taken as a whole, this experimental speculative fiction invites parallels to social justice movements focused on sexuality and gender, as well as cautionary tales for our precarious political movement. Parkison and Guess offer no solutions to their characters' captivity. Instead, they challenge their audience to read against the grain of conventional feminist dystopian narratives by inviting them inside the ""Girl Zoo"" itself. Take a step inside the zoo and see for yourself. We dare you. Behind the bars, a world of wonder awaits.

Winner of the FC2 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction PrizeA darkly comical horror lurks beneath the surface of everyday events in Refrigerated Music for a Gleaming Woman, a seductively poetic story collection of unusual brilliance and rare humor. In Aimee Parkison’s Refrigerated Music for a Gleaming Woman, lovers find unexpected romance in cramped spaces, fast food addicts struggle through cheeseburger addiction, and the splendor of nature competes with the violence of television. All the while, a complicated and precarious present dawns onto a new world where wealthy women wear children’s eyes as jewelry and those in need of money hawk their faces only to forever mourn what parts of themselves they have sold to survive. Open the refrigerator door. Inside are antique jars. Open them to hear the music: Beethoven playing piano; slaves singing for freedom in plantation fields; mothers humming lullabies through the night to smallpox babies, knowing this song is the last sound their children will ever hear. As Stephen Graham Jones notes in his foreword to this prize-winning collection, “The best books . . . fold you into a darkness sparkling with life. They lock you in the refrigerator but they also pipe in some music that never repeats, and when the door starts to open, you cling tight to it, so you can have just a few minutes more. This book, it’ll be over far too fast for you, yes. But even were it five times as thick as it is now, it would still be too short. Remember, though, the best books, they’re loops. They never stop. This one still hasn’t, for me.”

*Parkison is a dynamic, cutting-edge young fiction writer.*Parkison's awards include a Christopher Isherwood Fellowship, a Writers at Work Fellowship, and a Kurt Vonnegut Fiction Prize. Her first collection, Woman With Dark Horses, was published in 2004 as Winner of the Starcherone Fiction Prize. *Parkison's writing is post-modern with a realist slant. She has been endorsed by such authors as Brian Evenson, Cris Mazza, Alison Lurie, and Gina Frangello.