Description
In her debut collection of stories, Pretend We Live Here, Genevieve Hudson explores the idea of home and what it means to find one: in the body, in the world, in other people. Her characters are seekers, whose actions are influenced by their slippery identities and by the strange landscapes that surround them.
In “Boy Box,” a young woman yearns to test her luck with a wild punk girl crush. In “God Hospital,” a character journeys deep into the woods of Alabama in search of an infamous religious healer, hoping he can fix her teeth. In “Adorno,” someone in need of forgiveness crosses paths with a band of radical vegan activists and gets subsumed into their world. In “Dance!,” a recluse writes a breakthrough song for her pink dolphin, but the song’s success only drives her further away from society. Set in Amsterdam, the Pacific Northwest, and the Deep South, these stories hum with sexual tension, queerness, displacement, longing, humor, and dark nostalgia.
“A terrific collection of stories. There are echoes here of Flannery O’Connor, Barry Hannah, and Denis Johnson, but Genevieve Hudson is her own writer—impressively and gloriously so. Her eye for the clinching detail is unnerving and her sympathies are fascinatingly conflicted. I hope, and suspect, this book will be the start of a long and inspiring career.” —Tom Bissell, author of The Disaster Artist and Magic Hours
“Jagged, queer, and nervy, these stories beat with an urgent, potent pulse. They’re often funny, sometimes wrenching, and never predictable. A bold and bracing debut.” —Chelsey Johnson, author of Stray City
“In Pretend We Live Here, characters bleed and breathe with a caustic energy that dares the reader to keep pace as they are taken from the Deep South to Western Europe and back again. Genevieve Hudson is a new, coming-of-age voice that spotlights rural America, injecting it with a queer freshness that makes her writing impossible to forget.” —Jing-Jing Lee, author of How We Disappeared
“Poetic, twisted, wild, and tender, Genevieve Hudson writes with what some call a burning tongue. On every page, her agile, clashing lines throw off sparks of youth and queer desire. Check this out. Here is a writer at the beginning of something truly great.” —Jon Raymond, author of Freebird
“Full of blood and dust and stars and light, Hudson captures the beauty and horror of the everyday and makes it all seem like magic.” —Leah Dieterich, author of Vanishing Twins: A Marriage
Genevieve Hudson is also the author of A Little in Love with Everyone (Fiction Advocate, 2018), a book on Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. Her writing has been published in Catapult, Hobart, Tin House online, Joyland, Vol.1 Brooklyn, Split Lip, The Collagist, No Tokens, Bitch, The Rumpus, and other places. Her work has been supported by the Fulbright Program and artist residencies at the Dickinson House, Caldera Arts, and the Vermont Studio Center. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from Portland State University, where she occasionally teaches Fiction Writing and Gender Studies courses. She recently sold her first novel to Norton.
Released on July 24th, 2018. This page is for purchasing the paperback edition. If you wish to own one of the limited edition hardcovers, which we have 99 copies of, go to this page. Thank you.
ISBN: 9781892061829
172 pages
Cover design by Jess Vande Werken, Photo by Elena Kendall-Aranda
Also read: Genevieve’s story, “Too Much Is Never Enough,” on Joyland.
