Conjurer — Jennifer Pashley

Fiction. LGBT Studies. "Jennifer Pashley is a phenomenal young writer with perfect pitch for the messy world we all live in now. THE CONJURER is riddled with romance and terror, anxiety and mystery, threat and uneasy relief. All our frailties are on view--beautifully observed, served with the utmost generosity and largeness of heart, seen with the smartest eyes. She deserves an award for writing like this."--Frederick Barthelme"The stories in THE CONJURER are unflinching in their portrayal of humans in love and the side effects of passion--strange consummations, half-hearted substitutions, moments of grace. Pashley is a hard luck oracle, tracing portents in a world heavy with the weight of not-quite babies, truck-stop infidelities, the ghosts of June Carter and Raymond Carver and Flannery O'Connor. These beautiful stories walk the edge between bravado and poetry, creating their own weird magic. One of the characters imagines being poisoned from the inside out by gold flaked from the rim of an old coffee cup; this collection accomplishes a similar feat, a gorgeous poisoning, Pashley's language a precious lethal substance spreading into all the hidden places."--Tina May Hall