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Alice
Adelard starts off dying and spends a long time in a strange gray world of undeath searching for his elusive and magically shapeshifting wife, Alice. Along the way he battles the mythological Native American beast the Wendigo, spends time trapped as a hungry ghost, a bored immortal, and, at times, the Wendigo itself. Alice is an imaginative exploration that blurs the lines between myth and fact, what is imagined and what is true, and the artistic lie of fiction in getting to a deeper truth.
“Held in a cryptic in-between place fraught with many Alices, new bodies that struggle to know hunger and monsters that once were men, Compton’s Alice boldly unfurls itself. With every sentence a poem and its vibrant imagery, Compton completely captures.” –xTx, author of Today I Am a Book
“Poetic, strange, mythic, and true, this work by Sheldon Lee Compton will take your breath away. It’s life and death and love and loss. It’s survival and transformation. The artistry is reminiscent of Matt Bell, but it’s Compton’s inimitable voice that shines through each and every page of this novella. Highly recommended.” –Kathy Fish, author of Rift and Together We Can Bury It
“Held in a cryptic in-between place fraught with many Alices, new bodies that struggle to know hunger and monsters that once were men, Compton’s Alice boldly unfurls itself. With every sentence a poem and its vibrant imagery, Compton completely captures.” –xTx, author of Today I Am a Book
“Poetic, strange, mythic, and true, this work by Sheldon Lee Compton will take your breath away. It’s life and death and love and loss. It’s survival and transformation. The artistry is reminiscent of Matt Bell, but it’s Compton’s inimitable voice that shines through each and every page of this novella. Highly recommended.” –Kathy Fish, author of Rift and Together We Can Bury It
115 pages, Paperback
Published October 17, 2023
1 person want to read
About the author
Sheldon Lee Compton
29 books105 followersSheldon Lee Compton is a short story writer, novelist, prose poet, and editor from Pike County, Eastern Kentucky.
He is the author of the short story collections The Same Terrible Storm (Foxhead Books, 2012), Where Alligators Sleep (Foxhead Books, 2014), Absolute Invention (Secret History Books, 2019) and Sway (Cowboy Jamboree Press, 2020).
Compton is also the author of the novels Brown Bottle (Bottom Dog Press, 2016) and Dysphoria (Cowboy Jamboree Press, 2019).
His poetry chapbook Podunk Lore was part of the Lantern Lit series (Dog On a Chain Press, 2018) and his first full-length poetry collection, Runaways, was published in 2021 by Alien Buddha Press.
Compton's novel, Alice, was named one of the Best Books of 2023 as selected by the Independent Fiction Alliance.
In 2021 Cowboy Jamboree Press published The Collected Stories of Sheldon Lee Compton and followed that in 2022, on the anniversary of author Breece D'J Pancake's tragic death on April 8, 1979, Compton's memoir The Orchard Is Full of Sound, which the publisher describes as a book that "reflects on his [Compton's] own life, his struggles with poverty and divorce and violence and addiction and fatherhood and an early heart attack and trying to make it as a writer in rural Kentucky, all the while trying to trace the life and tragic ending of one of his literary heroes, Breece D'J Pancake."
In 2012, Compton was a finalist for both the Gertrude Stein Fiction Award and the Still Fiction Award. His writing has been nominated for the Chaffin Award for Excellence in Appalachian Writing, the Pushcart Prize, and longlisted for Wigleaf's Top 50. He was cited twice for Best Small Fictions, in 2015 and 2016, before having his short story "Aversion" included in Best Small Fictions 2019 and his short story "The Good Life" included in Best Small Fictions 2022.
Since 2020, he has taught in the Master of Fine Arts program at Concordia University, St. Paul. He also edits the Poverty House Collective and writes the interview series Chaos Questions for Hobart.
He is the author of the short story collections The Same Terrible Storm (Foxhead Books, 2012), Where Alligators Sleep (Foxhead Books, 2014), Absolute Invention (Secret History Books, 2019) and Sway (Cowboy Jamboree Press, 2020).
Compton is also the author of the novels Brown Bottle (Bottom Dog Press, 2016) and Dysphoria (Cowboy Jamboree Press, 2019).
His poetry chapbook Podunk Lore was part of the Lantern Lit series (Dog On a Chain Press, 2018) and his first full-length poetry collection, Runaways, was published in 2021 by Alien Buddha Press.
Compton's novel, Alice, was named one of the Best Books of 2023 as selected by the Independent Fiction Alliance.
In 2021 Cowboy Jamboree Press published The Collected Stories of Sheldon Lee Compton and followed that in 2022, on the anniversary of author Breece D'J Pancake's tragic death on April 8, 1979, Compton's memoir The Orchard Is Full of Sound, which the publisher describes as a book that "reflects on his [Compton's] own life, his struggles with poverty and divorce and violence and addiction and fatherhood and an early heart attack and trying to make it as a writer in rural Kentucky, all the while trying to trace the life and tragic ending of one of his literary heroes, Breece D'J Pancake."
In 2012, Compton was a finalist for both the Gertrude Stein Fiction Award and the Still Fiction Award. His writing has been nominated for the Chaffin Award for Excellence in Appalachian Writing, the Pushcart Prize, and longlisted for Wigleaf's Top 50. He was cited twice for Best Small Fictions, in 2015 and 2016, before having his short story "Aversion" included in Best Small Fictions 2019 and his short story "The Good Life" included in Best Small Fictions 2022.
Since 2020, he has taught in the Master of Fine Arts program at Concordia University, St. Paul. He also edits the Poverty House Collective and writes the interview series Chaos Questions for Hobart.
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