Salt Folk - by Ryan Habermeyer (Paperback)

About the Book

"Set within a speculative geography that is and is not Utah's past, present, and future, the panoramic collage of stories and flash fictions in Salt Folk explore the eco-fabulist environs of the American West at the intersections of history and myth. The Yeti, recently deported from the Himalayas, finds himself in a Mormon retirement community. A glacier grows in the toxic valley left behind by the evaporated Great Salt Lake. A librarian collects the residue of a decayed rainbow on the outskirts of Salt Lake City. Melancholically absurd, the salty women and foolhardy men in Ryan Habermeyer's reimagined American West confront catastrophes large and small, magical and mundane, with grotesque optimism and quixotic tenderness"--

Book Synopsis

Finalist​, Short Fiction, Association for Mormon Letters Awards (2024)

Set within a speculative geography that is and is not Utah's past, present, and future, the panoramic collage of stories and flash fictions in Salt Folk explore the eco-fabulist environs of the American West at the intersections of history and myth. The Yeti, recently deported from the Himalayas, finds himself in a Mormon retirement community. A glacier grows in the toxic valley left behind by the evaporated Great Salt Lake. A librarian collects the residue of a decayed rainbow on the outskirts of Salt Lake City. Melancholically absurd, the salty women and foolhardy men in Ryan Habermeyer's reimagined American West confront catastrophes large and small, magical and mundane, with grotesque optimism and quixotic tenderness.

Review Quotes

"Habermeyer writes with the existential despair of Samuel Beckett, the nightmarish humor of Franz Kafka, the discomfiting imagination of Ben Marcus, and the dark precision of Gordon Lish and his acolytes​."

-Dialogue

"Reading Ryan Habermeyer's stories is like being given a tour of an eccentric inventor's laboratory. . . . Dozens of clockwork devices crank through unknowable tasks. And no matter how closely you watch, from the flick of a switch to the final electrical zap, you never follow exactly how you find, in your open palms, each story's small miracle."

-Zach Powers, author of Gravity Changes

"Habermeyer is a fearless and ardent writer. His sentences shimmer, startle, and slay. I urge you to read this book."

-Michelle Ross, author of They Kept Running

"This salty, unfiltered collection will immerse you in sensation, from marvel to horror, sorrow to lust."

-Trudy Lewis, author of The Empire Rolls

"The crazed crystalline stories found in Ryan Habermeyer's multifaceted Salt Folk work together like cantilevered mobiles of pristine prisms chiming in a gale force wind of pure segmented light-laminations of litanies, collaged matrices, sonic booms and tectonic tangos."

-Michael Martone, author of Plain Air: Sketches from Winesburg, Indiana

"Salt Folk, the new collection of stories by Ryan Habermeyer, astounds as one of the most innovative and eclectic collections I've read in some time. . . . The worst moment in the book is when it ends, but hopefully, this is only a glimpse of what is to come from this talented and daring author."

-Michael Czyzniejewski, author of The Amnesiac in the Maze