IN HER OWN WORDS: AMELIA GRAY

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Here's what Amelia Gray has to say about her book Museum of the Weird.

Museum of the Weird is about people who have put themselves in situations and need to find a way out. The book is made up of what I figure are the best stories I've written over the past five years. One features a woman examining a plate of hair. In another, some funny things happen to a guy with a neurological condition. Here's part of that story:

Jeannie serves me tostadas at the café, the gold cross on her necklace (warm, no doubt, from her skin and the heat of the deep fryer) dangling close to my sweet iced tea. It's the first thing I see as I come out of the dangerous haze, and I feel small and close enough to the cross to make a leap for it. I'd like to dig my fingernails into the soft cooling gold and balance on the arm of it as on a tree branch, holding the chain for support.
"Watch the plate," Jeannie calls from miles above. She throws herself back like a gymnast and vertigo pins me to the wall. The generator in my heart ticks one sad farewell tick and silences. I miss it already.

There's another story that has kind of a science fiction feel. It's about a huge iron cube that appears on a beach while a group of people are having a picnic. Here's some of that one:

They didn't notice it at first, between the screaming Rogers kid, his mother's wailing panic to hustle him back to camp for ice, and the pandemonium of parents finding their own children and clasping them to their chests and lifting them up at once. The object in question itself received little scrutiny. Only when the mothers walked their children back to camp for calamine lotion and jelly beans did the rest of the adults notice the printed text, sized no larger than a half inch, on the shady side of the block: EVERYTHING MUST EVENTUALLY SINK.

The book is coming out in September through Fiction Collective 2, where it won the American Book Review/Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize.

Here's what some other people said:

“Amelia Gray’s Museum of the Weird is a cabinet of curiosities—a talking armadillo, a serial killer named God, a woman who amputates her toes for dinner, a man married to a paring knife—this collection of stories is so good and funny and wondrous that I couldn’t look away from her dark and curious imagination.”

—Michael Kimball, author of Dear Everybody

“To say Amelia Gray belongs in the hilariously inventive hallows of Ann Quin and Rikki Ducornet would be to miss her light. This book is gleaming evidence of the author as a trophy case unto herself, wrought of magic equally surprising, wicked, giddy, and loaded with a megaton of Boom.”

—Blake Butler, author of Scorch Atlas and Ever

“At times I worry that an author has maybe opted to go with an idea that is a bit of a reach, even for their many talents. I’ve learned to quit doing that with Amelia Gray and her stories, and after reading a couple of sentences, always decide to scrunch back in my chair and really settle in, as who knows where the hell she’s taking it. In what is becoming a very long streak, Gray has never gone anywhere that hasn’t amazed me.”

—Dan Wickett, Emerging Writers Network/Dzanc Books

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September
5.5 x 8.5 • 152 pages
ISBN-13: 978-1-57366-156-0
ISBN-10: 1-57366-156-2
$15.50 paper
ISBN-13: 978-1-57366-818-7
ISBN-10: 1-57366-818-4
$9.99 ebook