Ann Tracy

It's the 1930s in Texas when Charlie Bader comes of age with urges he has struggled with since childhood and does not understand. After his new bride finds him wearing her own sexy lingerie and leaves him in disgust, he tries to move on. His efforts lead him to Chicago, where he stumbles on a community of cross-dressers and begins to attend their secret soirees. When Pearl Harbor is bombed, he volunteers for the army, serving as a dentist and trying once again to leave his obsession with soft clothes behind. Instead, his wartime experiences combined with the army's faulty record-keeping lead to his reappearance in the small town of Heaven, Indiana, as Charlene. There, Charlene opens a beauty shop where Heaven's women safely share their stories and secrets as she shampoos, clips, curls, and combs their hair. Charlene deftly manages to keep her own story hidden and her sexual desires quiet until she falls in love with a female customer and her life begins to change.

Love, loss, hope, and grief--this book of poetry is my expression of true accounts of living with mental illness and substance abuse and the impact it has on the family unit. You, the reader, are not alone.

"It may or may not be true that we live each event twice, once as tragedy and once again as farce, but it's certainly true in literature, and in Ann Tracy's stunningly and aptly titled Winter Hunger the Windigo motif, such a force of horror and of spiritual dismay in it's previously studied versions, is used by the author for subversive and often hilarious purposes." Margaret Atwood on Winter Hunger

Ann Tracy is a master of intersection. Her new collection, Measuring and Other Stories, reads with the fluidity and familiarity of memoir, the succinctness of short story, the coherence of novel. The authorial voice itself is as if Robertson Davies meets the Marx Brothers but they are all staunch feminists. In each gem of a story she takes an extended metaphor (e.g., "Measuring") and polishes it till it sparkles with wit, wisdom, and poignancy. I began to list favorite passages to quote and gave up when the document was three pages long. Pressed to name a favorite in this array, I would have to say that it's impossible. I want to read every one of them over and over. And over. Jan Maher, author of The Persistence of Memory and Other Stories