Beyond All Reasonable Doubt, Jesus Is Alive! - by Melissa Lozada-Oliva (Hardcover)

About the Book

"A spiky and surprising short story collection about women and their demons: jealous men, predatory teachers, monsters, fame, inherited trauma, and their own personal BS"-- Provided by publisher.

Book Synopsis

"Melissa Lozada-Oliva writes with a perfect blend of intoxicating magic and unflinching humor, illuminating the visceral tensions of yearning and darkness that define our most human moments. A beautiful, sharp-tongued collection that feels like an instant classic with an edge all its own." --Chelsea Bieker, author of Madwoman and Godshot

From the author of Dreaming of You and Candelaria comes an ethereal and revelatory short story collection about faith, delusion, and the demons that can't get enough of us.

A beheaded body interrupts a quinceañera. An obsession with her father's bizarre video game shifts a lonely girl's reality. A sentient tail sprouts from a hospital worker's backside, throwing her romantic life into peril. And in the novella "Community Hole," a recently cancelled musician flees New York and finds herself in a haunted punk house in Boston.

This collection, at once playful, grisly, and tender, presents a tapestry of women ailing for something to believe in - even if it hurts them. Using body horror, fabulism, and humor, Melissa Lozada-Oliva mines the pain and uncanniness of the modern world. Reveling in the fine line between disgust and desire, Beyond All Reasonable Doubt, Jesus is Alive! is for the sinner in us all.

Review Quotes

"Lozada-Oliva's cleverness shines through a collection that will unsettle you in the best way."
--Christina Orlando, Reactor

"Melissa Lozada-Oliva is a wonderful, wonderful writer . . . What is most striking to me about Lozada-Oliva's work is its tenderness in spite of the strangeness: she always loves the ghosts. No matter how surreal her writing gets, she never loses the thread of compassion."
--James Folta, Lit Hub

"Magic, humor, and faith ground Lozada-Oliva's story collection, which features beheaded bodies, bizarre video games, sentient tails, and haunted punk houses."
--Eva M. Baron, The Millions

"The stories in Beyond All Reasonable Doubt, Jesus is Alive! are like ghost stories that ghosts would tell about the living to scare each other. Melissa Lozada-Oliva must secretly have two hearts or something! A single plane of reality is never big enough for her; in this emotionally iridescent collection, she pulls off charm and gloom with equal aplomb."
--Tony Tulathimutte, author of Rejection

"Melissa Lozada-Oliva writes with a perfect blend of intoxicating magic and unflinching humor, illuminating the visceral tensions of yearning and darkness that define our most human moments. A beautiful, sharp-tongued collection that feels like an instant classic with an edge all its own."
--Chelsea Bieker, author of Madwoman and Godshot

"Eerie, hilarious, tender and surreal, Melissa Lozada-Oliva makes her mark as a shimmering patron saint of the weird girl lit world."
--GennaRose Nethercott, author of Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart and Thistlefoot

"Hilarious and deliriously odd, Beyond All Reasonable Doubt, Jesus is Alive! dives giddily into the joys and troubles of being a flawed person. I was mesmerized by each of Lozada-Oliva's delicious jumps of imagination, landing in a place more marvelous and heart-achingly human than I would ever expect."
--Gerardo Sámano Córdova, author of Monstrilio

"Beyond All Reasonable Doubt, Jesus Is Alive! is beautiful, moving, weird, and complex in all the best ways. With precision and the command of language of an accomplished poet, Lozada-Oliva puts into words feelings and truths I didn't know how to name, but immediately recognized. A wild ride of a single imagination."
--Ananda Lima, author of Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil

"In Melissa Lozada-Oliva's hands, girlhood is the eerie, seething, unsurvivable thing that women all know it to be. Lozada-Oliva's protagonists cry, scheme, joke, lie, mourn, humiliate themselves, and scream for attention in settings both familiar and fantastical. It's a mark of the author's brilliance that as they do all this, they also charm us, every step of the way."
--Rax King, author of Tacky

About the Author

Melissa Lozada-Oliva is a poet, novelist and screenwriter. A child of Guatemalan and Colombian immigrants, she is the author of peluda, Dreaming of You and Candelaria. Melissa's work has appeared in Vulture, Harper's Bazaar, BBC Mundo, Audible, The Yale Review, NPR, and more. She lives and teaches in New York City. She only prays on planes.