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Dead Girls and Other Stories
"A breathlessly fast-moving collection that leaves a reader enchanted, provoked, and curious about the little-noticed corners of the darkening world." ― The New York Times Book Review
"An eerie convergence of female identities and experiences across time and space . . . Startling, far-reaching tales of women who haunt and are haunted." ― Kirkus Reviews, starred review
With lyric artistry and emotional force, Emily Geminder's debut collection charts a vivid constellation of characters fleeing their own stories. A teenage runaway and her mute brother seek salvation in houses, buses, the backseats of cars. Preteen girls dial up the ghosts of fat girls. A crew of bomber pilots addresses the ash of villagers below. And from India to New York to Phnom Penh, dead girls both real and fantastic appear again and as obsession, as threat, as national myth and collective nightmare.
"An eerie convergence of female identities and experiences across time and space . . . Startling, far-reaching tales of women who haunt and are haunted." ― Kirkus Reviews, starred review
With lyric artistry and emotional force, Emily Geminder's debut collection charts a vivid constellation of characters fleeing their own stories. A teenage runaway and her mute brother seek salvation in houses, buses, the backseats of cars. Preteen girls dial up the ghosts of fat girls. A crew of bomber pilots addresses the ash of villagers below. And from India to New York to Phnom Penh, dead girls both real and fantastic appear again and as obsession, as threat, as national myth and collective nightmare.
169 pages, Kindle Edition
First published October 17, 2017
17 people are currently reading
646 people want to read
About the author
Emily Geminder
4 books12 followersEmily Geminder is the author of Dead Girls and Other Stories, winner of the Dzanc Books Short Story Prize. Her work has appeared in AGNI, American Short Fiction, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, Tin House, Witness, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a Glenna Luschei Award, an AWP Intro Journals Award, and a Pushcart special mention. She lives in Los Angeles, where she is currently a Provost's Fellow in fiction at the University of Southern California.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 47 reviews
February 22, 2023
This short story collection wasn’t bad but too many things overlapped and it made it hard to differentiate between them. The theme of death became too much in the end and left me feeling a little melancholy.
October 19, 2017
Every story in this book is so strong and singularly amazing, but Dead Girls really culminates in more than the sum of its parts. While reading it I thought about how trauma affects the perception of reality (reality of the body, reality of place, reality of experience). The book gets at some really complicated ideas, but it also works really well on both the plot and sentence level, so that it was a joy to read. I found myself reading lines aloud and jotting them down and going back to reread paragraphs I had read pages ago because I couldn't get them out of my head. Everyone should read this book.
November 6, 2017
This is a powerful collection that examines issues of gender, sexual politics and violence. Emily Geminder's heroines travel through various American towns and onto the international stage, all while trying to make sense of a world that is not truly invested in their survival.
September 23, 2018
This book fully captures why I love short story collections.
Geminder is first of all, a brilliantly lyrical and magnetic writer. I couldn't help but be drawn in to her writing every time my eyes hit the page.
With stories weaving together themes about gender, identity, politics, trauma, and more, the focus of the book is on perception and the self: how the world sees us versus how we see ourselves and what comes of those perceptions. Sometimes reality wavers or is more gauzy as in the strange ghostliness of "1-800-FAT-GIRL", and sometimes the harshness of it comes right in your face, like in the more journalistic stories set in other countries.
Each story offers something new that I really had to think about and sit with. This isn't the type of collection you can just breeze through, and you won't want to either. There are so many beautiful sentences to contemplate and savor—a true joy to read.
Favorite stories: "Houses," "1-800-FAT-GIRL," "Coming to," "Edie," and "Dead Girls." And yes, that's half of them! They are so good. It's hard to choose.
My thanks to Dzanc Books for sending me a copy of this one.
Geminder is first of all, a brilliantly lyrical and magnetic writer. I couldn't help but be drawn in to her writing every time my eyes hit the page.
With stories weaving together themes about gender, identity, politics, trauma, and more, the focus of the book is on perception and the self: how the world sees us versus how we see ourselves and what comes of those perceptions. Sometimes reality wavers or is more gauzy as in the strange ghostliness of "1-800-FAT-GIRL", and sometimes the harshness of it comes right in your face, like in the more journalistic stories set in other countries.
Each story offers something new that I really had to think about and sit with. This isn't the type of collection you can just breeze through, and you won't want to either. There are so many beautiful sentences to contemplate and savor—a true joy to read.
Favorite stories: "Houses," "1-800-FAT-GIRL," "Coming to," "Edie," and "Dead Girls." And yes, that's half of them! They are so good. It's hard to choose.
My thanks to Dzanc Books for sending me a copy of this one.
April 30, 2018
This is the kind of book you find yourself putting in the hands of all your friends. Geminder investigates what it is to have a woman's body and move through the world, whether you're a foreigner in a new place or trying to escape the domestic space. Whether you're a girl or an adult. The speakers are slippery, the locations vary—yet these are connected through returning lines, characters, ideas. A powerful collection that accretes as you read.
August 5, 2018
I'm not sure exactly how to describe Emily Geminder's prose - dreamlike, in both its pacing and its attention to detail. Why is it that we always remember the strangest details after dreams? This book, it seems to me, is a narrative of erasure, detailing the things that erase us and our attempts to stop them. Geminder experiments with form, with narrator, even writing from the elusive "we." A phenomenal collection of stories.
June 4, 2018
The stories in this collection are lyrical, yet also display an intelligence that allured me to the page. In particular, Geminder captures the confusion of coming-of-age as well as the dislocation of expat life in prose that is compelling and in a tone that manages to feel "cool," but in the best of ways.
August 11, 2018
I loved the way each story builds upon and complicates the others. Some stories feel like small novellas - among them "Edie," a story about aliens, belief, and the complex friendship two girls as they come of age. Other stories seem to blurring genres: part essay, part poetry. My favorites were the title story and "Choreograph," a complex exploration of mental illness, trauma, and sisterhood.
September 27, 2020
Geminder's prose is lyric and at times breathtaking. Each story feels half a poem, digging deep into human nature, the beauty of the everyday and the way tragedy feels prosaic from too close.
"1-800-Fat-Girl" is as surreal and delightful as the title made me hope it would be, and really about female friendship, which is a consistent theme throughout the collection.
"Edie" is the story that most closely examines friendship, following two girls through playground best-friendship through troubled high school years, with threat and disfunction simmering on the edges of reality like Edie's insistence that she's an alien. (Obviously, you're always going to get me with the promise of an alien best friend.)
"Your Village Has Been Bombed" was haunting with its absurdity and meta-fictive feel.
"Choreograph" ties a story of a sister struggling with mental illness with the history of a famous dancer, and this blend of interesting fact and present fiction works throughout the collection.
I especially loved the relationship with a distant mentor in "Nausicaa" and now I want to read Ulysses for the first time.
"1-800-Fat-Girl" is as surreal and delightful as the title made me hope it would be, and really about female friendship, which is a consistent theme throughout the collection.
"Edie" is the story that most closely examines friendship, following two girls through playground best-friendship through troubled high school years, with threat and disfunction simmering on the edges of reality like Edie's insistence that she's an alien. (Obviously, you're always going to get me with the promise of an alien best friend.)
"Your Village Has Been Bombed" was haunting with its absurdity and meta-fictive feel.
"Choreograph" ties a story of a sister struggling with mental illness with the history of a famous dancer, and this blend of interesting fact and present fiction works throughout the collection.
I especially loved the relationship with a distant mentor in "Nausicaa" and now I want to read Ulysses for the first time.
July 14, 2018
Why I love this book:
"The greatest fear, I sometimes think, is that we are trapped: in bodies, in rooms, in time. Or the greatest fear is that we are not—that we can spill wide open.
If one is, as Kafka says, dead in one’s own lifetime, then the heart thuds a traitorous song: alive, alive. These are the things that move unseen: blood, wind. The heart, which opens and closes invisibly, by what internal mechanism we can never really say.
Fainting, then, is catastrophe or exodus. It’s an underworld that erupts in broad daylight. Fainting is a darkness, a flare.
...
For a while, I think of memory like swimming underwater. Its shadows fall the way light glimmers through waves, broken and formless; light, dark, light. Eventually there comes a moment, I think, when you have to rise for air. Eventually you come crashing through."
"The greatest fear, I sometimes think, is that we are trapped: in bodies, in rooms, in time. Or the greatest fear is that we are not—that we can spill wide open.
If one is, as Kafka says, dead in one’s own lifetime, then the heart thuds a traitorous song: alive, alive. These are the things that move unseen: blood, wind. The heart, which opens and closes invisibly, by what internal mechanism we can never really say.
Fainting, then, is catastrophe or exodus. It’s an underworld that erupts in broad daylight. Fainting is a darkness, a flare.
...
For a while, I think of memory like swimming underwater. Its shadows fall the way light glimmers through waves, broken and formless; light, dark, light. Eventually there comes a moment, I think, when you have to rise for air. Eventually you come crashing through."
June 18, 2020
I am fascinated by how deftly Emily Geminder pulls from various and sometimes contradictory aspects of style within the short story tradition. At one moment she has the economy of Amy Hempel, ferocious enough to court ambiguity, at others, she is conjuring otherworldly elements; sometimes, there’s clean traditional narrative, and at other times, she moves into experimental forms. Through all of it is a flooring amount of intelligence; this collection never strays from feeling solidly cerebral, in form and in content, even when it is lyrical and explores trauma and abuse. My favorites were “Dead Girls,” “Nausicaa,” and “Houses.”
August 7, 2018
A book about how, as we age, foreignness and childhood become a kind of ghostly presence that we will ever be haunted by, and fear, and love. How we cross that border endlessly and never stop. And about the cruelty that humans are capable of when the ghosts are unexplainably angry. I love how books so seemingly disparate in subject matter can feel united--that thread is endlessly satisfying to me.
January 29, 2019
I was awed by this book - the way it so generously inhabits voices, worlds, outlooks. Many of the stories explore the ways we overlap merge, overlap, identify and disidentify with each other. There's a playfulness in the way it blurs and muddies the lines between fiction and nonfiction. I wished it was longer.
June 5, 2018
Read the full review here: http://pageandplate.com/pages/#/dead-...
It's a short but very intense collection that focuses on subject matter that I don't usually seek out, but found myself really intrigued by all the same.
It's a short but very intense collection that focuses on subject matter that I don't usually seek out, but found myself really intrigued by all the same.
December 21, 2017
Best stories evoke Offill. Choreograph, Dead Girls, Houses.
October 22, 2020
Every line is gorgeous. This book kills me in the best of ways.
"I watched. I whispered. I wore her hand-me-downs like shrouds. I studied each and every one of her gestures and pulled on my second toe—it would grow longer, I thought, like hers—and this pulling became its own gesture, a secret sign between us. I was her mimic, her mime. I wanted to make myself a double. Or I wanted to grow inward, truer—toward the unspeakable part of me she seemed to speak.
There are the usual ways of falling in love. Less talked about are the ways in which one person may decide to become another. To transform, to transfigure. To come through the slow sludge of metamorphosis and find oneself changed."
"I watched. I whispered. I wore her hand-me-downs like shrouds. I studied each and every one of her gestures and pulled on my second toe—it would grow longer, I thought, like hers—and this pulling became its own gesture, a secret sign between us. I was her mimic, her mime. I wanted to make myself a double. Or I wanted to grow inward, truer—toward the unspeakable part of me she seemed to speak.
There are the usual ways of falling in love. Less talked about are the ways in which one person may decide to become another. To transform, to transfigure. To come through the slow sludge of metamorphosis and find oneself changed."
November 15, 2017
The language is exquisite and can seem almost dreamlike, but it has an undercurrent of pure steel. It explores gender and geopolitics and violence and love with precise, gorgeous prose and never flinches from the uncomfortable in-between spaces. Instead, it relishes them. Research is woven in without ever distracting from the narrative and--if you're anything like me--you'll google a few things when you can put the book down to find out even more. These stories are filled with curiosity about the world and it makes the reader curious. I've read this collection twice already and I'll probably read it again before the year's end, and every reading helps me notice something new. I can't recommend Dead Girls enough.
November 5, 2017
A book about connections between people, mostly dead but not necessarily girls, unfortunate events, literature, choreography, mental illness, Prince songs, and the time the Undertaker threw Mankind off Hell in a Cell. Easily the most intelligent thing I've read in years, though to be fair I mostly read dumb things. The author makes excellent use of intertextuality and research to vividly communicate her ideas.
Bonus points for writing about adventures in Asia without sounding like one of Rudyard Kipling's farts echoing racistly through eternity.
Bonus points for writing about adventures in Asia without sounding like one of Rudyard Kipling's farts echoing racistly through eternity.
January 11, 2018
A haunting collection of stories that span the globe from Cambodia to India and back to the United States. The stories are fast paced and easy to read in 24 hours but they will linger and come back to mind long after you have finished the book. Using lyrical and beautiful language, the author fearlessly touches on themes of violence, death, mental illness and sexual harassment inviting the reader to want to wonder about her characters. I can't wait to read more from this author.
October 9, 2019
This book came into my life at just the right time. I found myself underlining so many sentences. It's not about death, per se - more like the ways women are elided via erasure, gender-based violence, and other modes of silencing. That sounds bleak, but there are many moments of joy, laughter, and beauty here too.
February 10, 2019
A really beautiful writer. These stories are engaging and fresh, all dealing in some way with what it means to live in the "aftermath" - whether personal, political, historical. The stories range from friendships between girls to conversations between ghostly pilots, but all think deeply about what it means to be more or less than one person, and how identities may blur.
January 25, 2019
Doing really powerful work in the interstices of imagination and memory. Reminiscent of Denis Johnson, Maggie Nelson, etc. - a lot of lines I had to write down. Favorite stories were Dead Girls and Choreograph.
February 6, 2019
This was an intriguing collection, the kind that keeps shifting, unsettling the ground beneath your feet. Certain stories circle back to each other and call into question what you thought you knew. Would recommend this one highly.
July 27, 2019
This book is doing something rare and phenomenal. Some of the stories remind me of the writing of Maggie Nelson or Jenny Offill. I love the way the later stories seem to be blurring fiction and nonfiction.
February 14, 2020
Weird and lyrical, but not overly lyrical
I think of this as a collection about the things we don't notice, the things right there and obvious that we don't pay attention to - women's and girls' lives, chiefly
I will be thinking about this one for a while
I think of this as a collection about the things we don't notice, the things right there and obvious that we don't pay attention to - women's and girls' lives, chiefly
I will be thinking about this one for a while
October 9, 2019
One of my favorite collections in recent years.
August 13, 2018
A provocative and compelling debut. All the stories are written in radically different forms yet they felt all very connected too.
November 3, 2018
Spectacular. I wanted some of these stories to be novels.
February 8, 2019
captures the dreaminess of childhood perfectly... "edie" reminded me of ferrante but with aliens. i also just really loved the language.
March 31, 2018
This book has some beautiful language and fascinating moments- but it was very hard for me to track. I usually do not read story collections for some of the reasons in this story collection: repetition between unrelated stories, the feeling of lost time and place, lack of general clarity of subject. That being said, there are still good things about this collection. And who knows, maybe I’ve been reading too much lately that is so good that eh, okay makes me sadder than it should.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 47 reviews