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MONARCH: STORIES subverts the reader's common perceptions about how love can heal, how loss and suffering can transform, and how every character deserves a second chance. America's city scars, sewers, alleyways, and bars are landscape to their wars, as characters heal and transform under wind turbines and on open roads, in golden cornfields and with the wails of Chicago blues. Heroes in this collection are the marginalized, the sufferers, the down-trodden, the misfits, the wanderers, and the wounded, shaped by grief but not defined by their scars.
Honoring the human capacity for change, characters drive the collection, turning up the dial to raise the volume of voice for those who live on the fringe and are often ignored. In collection, MONARCH is an exploration of the human condition through a lens of damaged survivors as they learn to love through small acts of kindness, given and received. Characters bear traumas with their bodies, and often, they transgress. They break in, break down, and ultimately, break open.
An inclusive invitation, MONARCH aims at an intimate portrayal of scarred characters on American streets beating the drum of current culture against the fierce rhythm of critical social justice issues. With this at its heart, the collection Includes a reading guide written by the author with prompts intended to inspire discourse between readers, writers, and students, making the work of special interest to librarians, teachers, book clubs, and beyond.
Foreword by Chris Abani, author of The Secret History of Las Vegas (Penguin Books, 2014).
"This remarkable debut collection that traverses many of the parts of America that are unseen, or at least, unseen in this way, and gives us a wealth of material to engage with and themes that make a collection worth biting into--loyalty, betrayal, happiness and deep sorrow, addiction and victory and a reclamation of selves against the nearly impossible grind of modern American life."--Chris Abani, author of The Secret History of Las Vegas
"Superb, original and thoroughly alive with heartbreak and wonder. Tobias is electrifying." - Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and author of This is How You Lose Her
"Full of empathy and rendered in searing, visceral prose, MONARCH shines brightly. In eleven vivid, affecting stories, Tobias turns her careful attention toward the strugglers and strivers among us--the result is heartfelt and immersive."--Kimberly King-Parsons, author of Black Light
"The stories in MONARCH are raw and gritty and always real. Emily Jon Tobias gives voice to the outsiders, the misfits, and the broken. I can't say enough great things about this debut collection."--Willy Vlautin, author of Lean on Pete and The Night Always Comes
"Women's past and present mingle in Tobias's stories where sentences are loaded with momentum and crafted with astonishing descriptions and surprising beauty. Regrets and disappointments haunt forlorn characters in this collection as they push through the pain in needles and whiskey, in babies that float, in the car on the highway with the windows down-maybe all at the same time, forever fleeing but never able. MONARCH is packed with troubles, richly drawn and wrenched from alleys, from mattresses, lest we forget."--Thea Swanson, author of Mars
Fiction.
