by Amber Sparks

May We Shed These Human Bodies peers through vast spaces and skies with the world's most powerful telescope to find humanity: wild and bright and hard as diamonds. Here is humanity building: families reconstruct themselves, mothers fashion babies from two-by-fours and nails, boys make a mother out of leaves and twigs and wishes. Here is humanity tearing down: a wife sets her house on fire in revenge, a young girl plots to kill the ghosts that stalk her, a dying man takes the whole human race with him. Here is humanity transforming: feral children, cannibalistic seniors, animal wives—a whole sideshow's worth of oddballs and freaks. 

PRAISE:
"Sparks’s debut story collection swirls with a Tim Burton-like whimsy…modern fables in which epiphanies replace moral lessons and tales unfold with Grimm-like wickedness."
—Publishers Weekly

"Best Small Press Debut of 2012."
—The Atlantic

"Sometimes all it takes is a few sentences to knock you off your rocker. Or at least that’s the case in Sparks’s debut collection, which packs 30 short short stories, each its own modern fable, into one handsome book." 
—Flavorwire

"There was Aesop, Thomas Bulfinch, Edith Hamilton, Angela Carter—and now there is Amber Sparks with a new take on the fable. May We Shed These Human Bodies is a clever, scary, and charming debut collection full of great imagination."
—Michael Kimball, author of Big Ray and Dear Everybody

ABOUT AMBER SPARKS:
Amber Sparks's fiction has been featured in various publications, including New York Tyrant, Unsaid, Gargoyle, Smokelong Quarterly, Wigleaf, and elimae. Her chapbook, A Long Dark Sleep: Stories for the Next World, is included in the anthology Shut Up/Look Pretty, published by Tiny Hardcore Press. She is also a contributor at lit blogs Big Other and Vouched, and lives in Washington, D.C. with a husband and two beasts.

PRESS:
The Wire
HTML Giant
Volume 1 Brooklyn
Tweed's Magazine of Art and Literature
Artvoice
American Short Fiction
Monkeybicycle
Small Press Book Review
Pank Magazine
Heavy Feather Review
Ampersand and Review
Great Writers Steal
Otherppl Podcast
What I'm Trying to Say Podcast
The Nervous Breakdown

PUBLICATION DETAILS:
Pages: 150
ISBN: 978-0983422877
Publication Date: October 2012