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You Are the Snake: Stories
From the celebrated author of Juliet the Maniac comes a collection of previously unpublished stories concerned with girlhood, family, and urge, reminiscent of Mary Gaitskill and Laura Vandenberg
In You Are the Snake, we peer into the life of a community college student, the life of an abusive grandmother is imagined, and a young woman takes up gardening. Escoria’s characters are trying their best, or they aren’t, as they bump against the boundaries of society’s expectations.
Exploiting the form of the short story in a voice entirely her own, You Are the Snake resists easy moralizing by subverting our expectations of how narrative functions. While Escoria plumbs the depth of girlhood and new womanhood, she leaves room for oddness, impulse, and yearning. Each story contains its own world, be it the suburbs of California or the mountians of West Virginia, but taken as a whole, this collection is expanding and challenging, corrupting expectations about what women can be and what they can write.
Juliet Escoria’s writing has been called “vivid,” “fantastic,” “sharp,” and “singularly honest,” and this collection delivers the “charged eloquence” of her previous work, in addition to the maturity and style of a new format—the short story—which is a dream fit for her “electricity that pulsates from within the prose.”
In You Are the Snake, we peer into the life of a community college student, the life of an abusive grandmother is imagined, and a young woman takes up gardening. Escoria’s characters are trying their best, or they aren’t, as they bump against the boundaries of society’s expectations.
Exploiting the form of the short story in a voice entirely her own, You Are the Snake resists easy moralizing by subverting our expectations of how narrative functions. While Escoria plumbs the depth of girlhood and new womanhood, she leaves room for oddness, impulse, and yearning. Each story contains its own world, be it the suburbs of California or the mountians of West Virginia, but taken as a whole, this collection is expanding and challenging, corrupting expectations about what women can be and what they can write.
Juliet Escoria’s writing has been called “vivid,” “fantastic,” “sharp,” and “singularly honest,” and this collection delivers the “charged eloquence” of her previous work, in addition to the maturity and style of a new format—the short story—which is a dream fit for her “electricity that pulsates from within the prose.”
255 pages, Kindle Edition
First published June 18, 2024
17 people are currently reading
4840 people want to read
About the author
Juliet Escoria
14 books275 followersJULIET ESCORIA is the author of the novel JULIET THE MANIAC, forthcoming from Melville House in May 2019. She also wrote the poetry collection WITCH HUNT (Lazy Fascist Press 2016) and the story collection BLACK CLOUD (CCM/Emily Books 2014), which were both listed in various best of the year roundups. Her writing can be found in places like Lenny, Catapult, VICE, Prelude, Dazed, and Hobart and has already been translated into many languages. She lives in West Virginia with her husband, the writer Scott McClanahan.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 45 reviews
April 15, 2025
Strange, dark, unsettling, gruesome, and yet firmly grounded in realities of girlhood and womanhood. Random mention of Israel in one of the final short stories was really…. Offputting! I enjoyed some of these stories… not all. Even though I love love love love dark stories about disturbed and probably evil women, for some reason, the tone/style/approach in these stories didn’t quite work for me. Kind of felt a bit contrived and abrupt? Dabbled in topics of drug addiction, sexual violence, female lineages, metaphysicality, and sudden violent tragedies but like. Never truly explored them thoroughly. Which might be a difficult expectation to set for short stories, but I’ve seen it be done before, so….
January 14, 2024
Gut punchers from start to finish. There’s something about Juliet Escoria’s writing that feels like we’re getting access to the roiling inferno that is human nature beneath the facade of social propriety (what Nietzsche described as humanity’s sickness).
January 11, 2025
I'm catching more than a whiff of Lucia Berlin in these narratives of working class young women, updated to our dark times and concerns. Escoria's prose is tight, and the narrators' voices are spot-on. And it was uncomfortable reading "Same Person, Different Fires", about fires in California, with the carnage in LA right now.
June 26, 2024
I wish I had read this book when I was 16. Or 21. Or even 25. These coming-of-age stories showcasing female rage and outward expressions of emotion definitely would have made me feel less alone in the past. A big part of being a girl and a woman is trying to not “be crazy” or “irrational” or “emotional.” Escoria says “fu€k that” in several of these stories and I am absolutely here for it.
I flew through this collection and loved basically all of the stories. This is a book that I know I will find myself picking up again in the near future. I don’t think I can pick one favorite story but my top 3 were “Math Class,” “Little B!tch,” and “The Arsonist.”
Y’all know I am always in for short stories and novellas so this one was absolutely perfect for me. Check this one out if you have ever been made to feel less than, if you love stories involving female rage, or if you want a guilty pleasure binge read!!
Some squirmy quotes I loved:
“In the scheme of things, I will be dead soon, and no one will miss me. In the scheme of things, I never existed.
“…my ability to feign niceness had been exhausted. I couldn’t smile at anymore strangers. It was impossible.”
“It was she that was tamed, dependent on electric heat, running water, a warm bed, not the plants. And someday it would be her turn to rot in the soil.”
I flew through this collection and loved basically all of the stories. This is a book that I know I will find myself picking up again in the near future. I don’t think I can pick one favorite story but my top 3 were “Math Class,” “Little B!tch,” and “The Arsonist.”
Y’all know I am always in for short stories and novellas so this one was absolutely perfect for me. Check this one out if you have ever been made to feel less than, if you love stories involving female rage, or if you want a guilty pleasure binge read!!
Some squirmy quotes I loved:
“In the scheme of things, I will be dead soon, and no one will miss me. In the scheme of things, I never existed.
“…my ability to feign niceness had been exhausted. I couldn’t smile at anymore strangers. It was impossible.”
“It was she that was tamed, dependent on electric heat, running water, a warm bed, not the plants. And someday it would be her turn to rot in the soil.”
June 11, 2024
Intense! Full review soon!
Thank you to Soft Skull Press for my gifted review copy!
Thank you to Soft Skull Press for my gifted review copy!
June 9, 2024
This was fine- some of the stories are far more engaging than others. The writing can be short and stilted at times. There was a very random mention of Israel toward the end that seemed to serve no purposes and leaves me wondering why the author chose to include it. Full review to come.
February 3, 2025
This is a collection of short stories that deals with violence coming from women. With the way girls and women of all ages inflict damage. And about the way the universe just doesn’t care if you’re a good person or not. It’s uneasy and unpleasant in a good way, about something dark and ugly and impenetrable that sits in every person (to a various degree though). Sharp and clean writing, gripping my attention all the way from first story to last.
September 23, 2024
I didn't want this book to end. Every time I finished a story in You Are the Snake, I was eager to dive into the next one. No matter how dark the subject matter got, I was hooked. It's because of Juliet Escoria's voice, she can write about anything and you trust her narrators to tell it like it really is. She makes everyone else sound like they're just bullsh*tting.
April 12, 2025
Some throwaways, but this collection slowly grew on me. Standouts included the titular story and “Hazel: A Diptych.”
January 3, 2025
My expectations of this could not have been more wrong… this was significantly more dark, twisty, and melancholy than I anticipated. I was expecting some of these themes, but it was overkill and left me feeling blah and fearful over being a woman instead of seen, empowered, and united. I think some of these works standing alone would have power and purpose but all together was just too much imo.
October 2, 2024
Very dark and twisty - not a great pick by me since I’m already very anxious!! Quick read and pretty interesting.
July 2, 2024
I like Juliet Escoria’s writing so much—a new book is cause for celebration. I loved these stories.
July 27, 2024
Funny, blunt, and sometimes deeply upsetting. Written in a unique and compelling voice. Julia Escoria manages to craft fully realized characters within each short story, and by the end of this collection their shared world had emerged.
May 30, 2025
la sezione “consigliato dai nostri librai” difficilmente delude. questa raccolta è cruda, poetica, disturbante, rabbiosa, controversa ma soprattutto femmina. Incredibilmente ben scritto anche se non tutti i racconti hanno avuto lo stesso impatto
December 21, 2025
Pure gritty realism, a nostalgic slice coming of age as a troubled young girl in the ‘90s and early 2000s. Most stories are set in the Southern California region, and bop around to early 2010s NYC during Hurricane Sandy, Baltimore, and later, West Virginia.
This surprised me, I wasn’t expecting to like this as much as I did. Juliet Escoria has mentioned in interviews and personal essays that she’s a big fan of Lucia Berlin, and as someone who recently had to put down A Manual for Cleaning Women, I was pretty wary if I was going to like this. I can see Berlin's influence in Escoria’s writing style and subject matter, but I much prefer Escoria’s writing. I feel like even though some of the stories were stilted and ended abruptly (which is common among short story collections) many still had more of a narrative arc and character development compared to Berlin’s. You could say that this a millennial version of Berlin’s writing (without the casual racism), but there are key differences.
What makes this collection unique is that it's truly an exploration of female rage in a way that I don’t commonly see in literature. A lot of what is marketed as “female rage” nowadays is usually focused on women who are middle-aged, and sick of domesticity, so they are finding their anger later on in life, or young women who turn that anger inward and completely self-destruct. In this collection, at least in the initial stories, adolescent girls express their anger outwardly, in fits of physical rage and violence. I think a lot of the stories were really able to capture simmering adolescent rage from a female perspective, particularly rage that is due to being an outsider.
One of the standouts is “The Other Time A Grown Man Threatened My Life” where a skinhead mall cop starts hanging out with the narrator’s friend group, other teenage mall employees, giving them beer and liquor. The unspoken tension between him and the narrator reminded me a bit of a scene in Aria Aber’s Good Girl. The story “Dust Particles” is a deeply sad and unsettling snapshot of how sexually abused children can mimic and act out the sexual abuse they are receiving. “Hazel: A Diptych” explores intergenerational trauma and mental illness, trying to imagine and understand relatives who are the family's buried secret. It’s done in an overlaid style of two different narratives, with a slightly magical realism element.
Overall I enjoyed this, which sounds weird because the subject matter is so dark: addiction, anger, sexual assault, child sexual abuse, mental illness, death, etc. The abruptness was the main problem for me with this collection, there were a few stories that ended so quickly right when I felt we could have explored themes deeper.
This surprised me, I wasn’t expecting to like this as much as I did. Juliet Escoria has mentioned in interviews and personal essays that she’s a big fan of Lucia Berlin, and as someone who recently had to put down A Manual for Cleaning Women, I was pretty wary if I was going to like this. I can see Berlin's influence in Escoria’s writing style and subject matter, but I much prefer Escoria’s writing. I feel like even though some of the stories were stilted and ended abruptly (which is common among short story collections) many still had more of a narrative arc and character development compared to Berlin’s. You could say that this a millennial version of Berlin’s writing (without the casual racism), but there are key differences.
What makes this collection unique is that it's truly an exploration of female rage in a way that I don’t commonly see in literature. A lot of what is marketed as “female rage” nowadays is usually focused on women who are middle-aged, and sick of domesticity, so they are finding their anger later on in life, or young women who turn that anger inward and completely self-destruct. In this collection, at least in the initial stories, adolescent girls express their anger outwardly, in fits of physical rage and violence. I think a lot of the stories were really able to capture simmering adolescent rage from a female perspective, particularly rage that is due to being an outsider.
One of the standouts is “The Other Time A Grown Man Threatened My Life” where a skinhead mall cop starts hanging out with the narrator’s friend group, other teenage mall employees, giving them beer and liquor. The unspoken tension between him and the narrator reminded me a bit of a scene in Aria Aber’s Good Girl. The story “Dust Particles” is a deeply sad and unsettling snapshot of how sexually abused children can mimic and act out the sexual abuse they are receiving. “Hazel: A Diptych” explores intergenerational trauma and mental illness, trying to imagine and understand relatives who are the family's buried secret. It’s done in an overlaid style of two different narratives, with a slightly magical realism element.
Overall I enjoyed this, which sounds weird because the subject matter is so dark: addiction, anger, sexual assault, child sexual abuse, mental illness, death, etc. The abruptness was the main problem for me with this collection, there were a few stories that ended so quickly right when I felt we could have explored themes deeper.
October 3, 2024
Enjoyed 'Juliet The Maniac' a few years ago. Had I known I could produce a memoir in stories like this I maybe would've found success with my manuscript years ago? It's certainly giving me big ideas. I thought this was short stories for the first few but then realized, no: they're STORIES. I recognized Escoria from her previous book as being this narrator, having these experiences. Then I could start enjoying it. The writing is a bit cute at times, but what saved it for me was the title story. Sometimes an ailing, dementia-ridden, crazy old family member says it best: get away from me!! You are a snake!! Sometimes it's the outside world pointing in.
July 26, 2024
3.5☆
|| #gifted #partner @softskullpress ||
✍🏻
Escoria's first book Juliet The Maniac was a favorite a few years ago so when I saw she had a new story collection coming out I was thrilled! And what a cover!! This gut punch of a story collection explores many aspects of coming of age womanhood and female rage. I wish I had this book in my 20's, it was funny, sad, intense, relatable, violent, honest and filled with tension. My favorites were Dust Particles, Math Class, I Am The Snake. If you enjoy Chelsea Hodgson and or Elle Nash's work you will enjoy this!
For more of my book content check out instagram.com/bookalong
|| #gifted #partner @softskullpress ||
✍🏻
Escoria's first book Juliet The Maniac was a favorite a few years ago so when I saw she had a new story collection coming out I was thrilled! And what a cover!! This gut punch of a story collection explores many aspects of coming of age womanhood and female rage. I wish I had this book in my 20's, it was funny, sad, intense, relatable, violent, honest and filled with tension. My favorites were Dust Particles, Math Class, I Am The Snake. If you enjoy Chelsea Hodgson and or Elle Nash's work you will enjoy this!
For more of my book content check out instagram.com/bookalong
March 7, 2024
You Are The Snake: Stories by Juliet Escoria
This collection explores the underside of growing up (including twenty somethings), and the odd things we do that we wouldn't repeat as adults. There's a certain level of discomfort which creates tension with the reader, but it just makes it even better.
It triggered reminiscing about Perpetual West and Sugar Run by Mesha Maren, and sure enough you might find a connection between the two on the internet.
Enjoyed!
This collection explores the underside of growing up (including twenty somethings), and the odd things we do that we wouldn't repeat as adults. There's a certain level of discomfort which creates tension with the reader, but it just makes it even better.
It triggered reminiscing about Perpetual West and Sugar Run by Mesha Maren, and sure enough you might find a connection between the two on the internet.
Enjoyed!
November 1, 2024
Not sure I can say that I "enjoyed" this book but what I will say is that the goal if the book was absolutely achieved!
Was it dark...yes
Was it uncomfortable...yes
Was it sad realizing that these stories are probably very close to home for a lot of people...also yes
Did it make me feel fortunate that I couldn't personally relate to any of these stories...10000%
Now excuse me while I go read a mushy love story to clear my pallet
Was it dark...yes
Was it uncomfortable...yes
Was it sad realizing that these stories are probably very close to home for a lot of people...also yes
Did it make me feel fortunate that I couldn't personally relate to any of these stories...10000%
Now excuse me while I go read a mushy love story to clear my pallet
February 18, 2024
Whoa....all of these stories are hard, heavy and stay with you a long time. Girls, women of all ages, are in these stories exploring heavy topics (such as rape and sexual assault). This book is hard to get through but oh so worth the read. Still thinking about these stories....will definitely be reading more from Juliet Escoria!
Thanks to PRH & Soft Skull for the ARC!
Thanks to PRH & Soft Skull for the ARC!
July 31, 2024
One of my top books of the year- a stunning collection of unholy desires, vile dreams, and all aspects of girlhood, be it bloody or beautiful. Made a note in the middle of reading the collection about how sturdy words can be when not overworked and Juliet is beyond talented at placing the right words at the right time to create a tone that is all hers. Will revisit often.
June 25, 2024
I had the pleasure of reading an advanced copy of this story collection before it was published. Juliet Escoria is a brilliant writer, her prose is clear sighted, unflinching, honest, brutal, and relatable. I have always enjoyed her writing. This collection is a stand out.
July 7, 2024
I really enjoyed this interesting collection of stories. "Hazel: A Diptych" had a unique style and was my favorite of the bunch. "Little Bitch" was a moving and funny depiction of trying to engage with children.
July 12, 2024
longtime fan of Juliet Escoria and her newest story collection exceeded expectations. these stories are funny, inspiring, sad, beautiful, relatable. highly recommend you pick this one up for your next summer read.
August 15, 2024
I really loved this short story collection! Thank you to the publishers for the free copy. The characters were complex and interesting, although not always relatable and sometimes slightly evil. Great read for the airport or road trip!
November 29, 2024
What a varied, skilled collection. Each story feels strong and unique in perspective and character and voice. There's a darkness to each story, but an honesty. I liked the span of place between Virginia and California and younger and older characters in different phases of life.
December 23, 2024
I really liked this book !!! I love coming-of-rage books about women. I was just so blindsided by the SA chapter jdjdjd I don't understand why it was ,,, there. I'm not sure what's there to get from it honestly. But it was such an interesting collection of stories.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
September 15, 2025
Having short stories makes it easier if you're reading before bed. There are fewer details to remember as you're simply heading to a different story. Definitely rated R. interesting perspectives. Something different if nothing else.
Want to read
June 4, 2024#GoodreadsGiveaway
June 28, 2024
I absolutely hate writing reviews. Just read it :) it’s fantastic.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 45 reviews