EVERY HUMAN LOVE (Acre Books, 2019)
Finalist for the Shirley Jackson Awards, the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for Fiction, and the Foreword INDIES Awards.
The fourteen stories in Every Human Love redefine our sense of reality. Set seemingly in the quotidian, these tales veer into the unexpected, the uncomfortable, occasionally the eerie, thrusting characters in crisis into still greater quandaries, where the world of weddings and work, of frustrated hopes and mundane dissatisfactions, collides with a realm of legend, of fairy tale, of nightmare.
Available for purchase at Bookshop.org, Amazon, Univ of Chicago Press, Barnes & Noble, or your favorite local independent bookstore.
Kirkus Reviews
“Pearson’s stories are meticulously written, with layers that are incrementally and patiently revealed. Her voice nimbly creates a sense of strangeness and detachment without ever lapsing into coldness. . . . At the heart of this collection are questions about how people can survive circumstances that demand hard choices without losing faith in everything in their lives up to that critical juncture.” (full review)
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Foreword Reviews (starred review)
"Imaginative and haunting, Every Human Love is a masterful collection of short stories by Joanna Pearson, written with insight and empathy. . . .there’s a strength, a lucidity, and a brilliance that shimmers and enchants." (full review)
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Synapsis
“Every Human Love is breathlessly stunning, in the sense that it is beautiful writing, but also in that it is profoundly unsettling. The fourteen stories in collection demand rests between one and the next in order to absorb the various uncanny landscapes: raw urban cities, the alleys of clinics and hospitals, Gothic southern farms and highways, 'the woods' and the things hiding in them, and delirious 'post-partum fever dream-ghost stories.'" (full review)
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