A Girl Goes Into the Forest - by Peg Alford Pursell (Paperback)

About the Book

"Following her acclaimed debut, Show Her a Flower, A Bird, A Shadow, award-winning author Peg Alford Pursell explores and illuminates love and loss in 78 hybrid stories and fables. A Girl Goes into the Forest immerses readers in the complex desires, contradictions, and sorrows of daughters, wives, and husbands, artists, siblings, and mothers. In forests literal and metaphorical, the characters try, fail, and try again to see the world, to hear each other, and to speak the truth of their longings. Powerful, lyrical, and precise, Pursell's stories call up a world at once mysterious and recognizable. A Girl Goes into the Forest invites fans of Lydia Davis and Helen Oyeyemi into a world where 'no one can deter a person from her mistakes'"--

Book Synopsis

*Founder and director of the national reading series Why There Are Words and founder and director of WTAW Press
*Author's stories and poems have appeared in Permafrost, the Los Angeles Review, Forklift Ohio, Joyland Magazine, 100 Word Story, and many other journals
*Work has appeared in anthologies including Nothing Short Of: Selected Tales from 100 Word Story, 50 over 50, Writers' e-Handbook, and Fragmentation and Other Stories *Previous collection featured in Poets & Writers magazine's second annual 5 over 50 and in 7x7 Magazine's "7 Spring Reads: Books You Need to Read Right Now"
*Previous collection was widely reviewed, including interviews and features in Entropy, The Rumpus, The Nervous Breakdown, Prosody Radio, and LitStack, among other outlets
*Finalist for the 2017 Indies Book of the Year, the Eric Hoffer Award, and the J L Chapbook Award by the Florida Review
*One story from the collection - "Starflower (I Want Her Back)" - has been nominated by The Mom Egg Review for the Best Small Fictions 2018
*Pursell has significant online reach through her own social media accounts and the accounts associated with Why There Are Words
*Pursell also has connections to local independent booksellers, including City Lights, Point Reyes, and The Booksmith
*Author is a well-connected staple of the literary community

Review Quotes

Advance Praise for A Girl Goes Into the Forest

"In these wistful, expansive stories, Peg Alford Pursell holds up a mirror to our lives and relationships. The stories excavate the lives of her narrators with honesty and clear, luminous prose. They are mysterious in the way the best fiction is--their truths echoing long after you turn the page."
--Karen E. Bender, National Book Award finalist and author of Refund

"The stories in A GIRL GOES INTO THE FOREST are as beautiful and fine as a string of pearls and as complex as a thousand-piece puzzle. Each one is like a doorway through which we glimpse an entire universe."
--Ramona Ausubel, author of Awayland and Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

"A GIRL GOES INTO THE FOREST is nominally a collection of stories, but in its thrilling and original presentation, the book defies categorization. Pursell is a writer of precise and gorgeously riveting images, and her sentences shimmer with the spaciousness and lyricism of poetry. Reading these tales is to be drawn into worlds that feel at once recognizable and mythic. The effect is transporting."
-Marisa Silver, author of Little Nothing and Mary Coin

"In seventy-eight viscerally powerful stories, Pursell masterfully reinvents the contemporary terrors and wonders that have faced the runaways and the revenants in our oldest tales. Passage by amazing passage, these interrelated stories capture the desiring and sorrowing and believing that can become threatening and then harmless and, at last, fatal. A spellbinding world."
-Kevin McIlvoy, author of The Complete History of New Mexico and Other Stories

"The ordinary lives of parents, daughters, husbands, wives, illness and grief are transformed in Pursell's second collection, A GIRL GOES INTO THE FOREST. Here, the lucky reader enters a 'forest' brimming with enchantments, daily life turned transcendent and strange, but no less moving. Assembled like a luminous mosaic of stained glass, these seventy-eight tales read like prose poems--a pitch-perfect condensation of moments, inflected by Pursell's uncanny ear for the lyric. A wonder of a book!"
-Karen Brennan, author of Monsters

"A GIRL GOES INTO THE FOREST runs like a collection of melted fairy tales in which archetypes of gender and culture are warped and subverted in the crucible of Pursell's formidable intellect. These are stories of a variety that Joy Williams would recognize, tales broken all to pieces and hidden away in a weird apothecary. Pull open a drawer. See what hides within."
--Christian Kiefer, author of Phantoms