Description
After steadily garnering attention and gaining fans with her appearances in various magazines and websites, Meredith Alling comes out with her debut collection of stories, Sing the Song. For fans of writers like Diane Williams, Amy Hempel, Lydia Davis, Ben Marcus, and Amelia Gray, Alling’s debut will signal the arrival of a new unique voice in fiction. Featuring 27 stories in 130 pages, Alling’s collection is propulsive, dangerous, often funny, and powered by a language that wrestles with anxiety and the unexpected surrealism of modern life. With an ancient ham crawling out from a sewer to tell fortunes, a lone blonde at a party for redheads, and a mother outsmarting a masked criminal,Sing the Song bleeds and breathes with dreamlike surprise.
“Small, intricate, diamond-perfect stories that glow with mystery and joy. I love this book.” – Ben Loory, author of Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day
“Bold, hilarious, beautifully strange, consistently surprising, and brilliantly unique — this collection asserts Alling as a daring new American voice.” – J. Ryan Stradal, New York Times bestselling author of Kitchens of the Great Midwest
“Meredith Alling’s song is one I haven’t heard before, her every sharp note a surprise. At every opportunity, Alling twists the mundane into the wild and unexpected. Her stories are born of keen observations, revealing a world I didn’t know existed, and already I am desperate for more. To read each story is to be involved in an exhilarating game, for which there are only winners.” – Brandi Wells, author of This Boring Apocalypse
“Meredith Alling is viscously mesmerizing. She takes reality and crumbles it up tight in her hands, wringing and smashing and squeezing it to death and when she opens her hands there is a bright flash and music bursting out of everything. Sing the Song is incredible, it devours normal.” – Bud Smith, author of F250
“Meredith Alling writes sugar-crusted nightmares that will give adventurous readers the sweetest cavities.” – Myriam Gurba, author of Painting Their Portraits in Winter
“How did she do this? Meredith Alling made the world look different for a time. Sharper, funnier, more tender and alive. All by the power of these stories. And prose so daring and original it’s as if she invented a new language. Sing the Song is a brilliant debut by one of our best, new writers. Read it.” – Kathy Fish, author of Rift (co-authored with Robert Vaughan) and Together We Can Bury It
“Funny and freewheeling, with a good punch to the gut when necessary. These stories will getcha.” – Amelia Gray, author of Threats
“I want to be, Donald Barthelme said, on the leading edge of the junk phenomenon. And Meredith Alling in Sing the Song, this postmodern Sears-Roebuckian catalogue of augmented and enriched hot messing scrambled transmogrifications, delivers fictions that are as sharp as the yipping yodeling angstroms of the molecule-thick edge hone of a samurai katana. These deadly deadpanned and panicked objective correlatives do indeed sing like the vibrations of celestial objects, like the nervous nominative notations quoted from beyond the quilted clouds. These are arias of the Seraphim hiccupping while high on isotopic helium.” – Michael Martone, author of Michael Martone and Winesburg, Indiana
Read an excerpt at Vol 1 Brooklyn and at The Fanzine.
Listen to Meredith on the Other People podcast.
Also available on eBook.
130 pages, ISBN 978-1-892061-80-5
Meredith Alling lives and works in Los Angeles. Her short fiction has appeared in Tin House, No Tokens, The Fanzine, Spork, The Guardian, and elsewhere. She is also on twitter.com.
