Girls of a Certain Age

A fearless, darkly playful debut exploring the many impossible choices that accompany 21st century femaleness.

What is the right way to handle an abusive partner? An unexpected pregnancy? A toxic friendship? Chronic unemployment? Gender dysphoria? A family member going to war? A disability? Anger? Loneliness?

Finding themselves in disempowering, frightening, or otherwise unendurable circumstances, the girls, women, and non-binary characters in Maria Adelmann's stories look for ways to free themselves into new lives or, at the very least, new states of feeling. Sometimes they do this by hurting someone else or getting hurt; sometimes by submitting, other times by mounting a rebellion. With a special talent for pressing the sharp up against the tender, Adelmann explores the many pathways through the titular condition.

Ranging in style from the magical to the terrifying to the calm tones of a self-help manual, Girls of a Certain Age captures the spectrum of strategies we apply to the pain of life, strategies that we persist in pretending might actually work.

Maria Adelmann’s work has been published by Tin House, n+1, The Threepenny Review, Indiana Review, Epoch, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and others. She has received fellowships from Cornell University and The University of Virginia, where she earned her BA and MFA respectively. Maria has had quite a few jobs (visual merchandiser, instructor, hotel reviewer) in quite a few cities (New York, Baltimore, Copenhagen) and once on a ship. She enjoys learning new crafts and letting personal projects take over her life. You can visit her online at mariaink.com or on Twitter and Instagram @ink176.