You are the Snake: Stories by Juliet Escoria

From the celebrated author of Juliet the Maniac comes a collection of previously unpublished stories concerned with girlhood, family, and urge, reminiscent of Mary Gaitskill and Laura van den Berg

In You Are the Snake, we peer into the life of a community college student, the life of an abusive grandmother is imagined, and a young woman takes up gardening. Escoria’s characters are trying their best, or they aren't, as they bump against the boundaries of society's expectations.

Exploiting the form of the short story in a voice entirely her own, You Are the Snake resists easy moralizing by subverting our expectations of how narrative functions. While Escoria plumbs the depth of girlhood and new womanhood, she leaves room for oddness, impulse, and yearning. Each story contains its own world, be it the suburbs of California or the mountains of West Virginia, but taken as a whole, this collection is expanding and challenging, corrupting expectations about what women can be and what they can write.

Juliet Escoria’s writing has been called “vivid,” “fantastic,” “sharp,” and “singularly honest,” and this collection delivers the “charged eloquence” of her previous work, in addition to the maturity and style of a new format—the short story—which is a dream fit for her “electricity that pulsates from within the prose.”

REVIEWS

"Cult favorite Juliet Escoria left San Diego for West Virginia and is back with a new collection of stories full of razor-sharp insights." —Jim Ruland, Los Angeles Times

"Sharp stories that resist moralizing and leave room for the beautiful, foggy grey areas." —Sophia June, Nylon

"Juliet Escoria isn’t afraid of writing monstrous characters . . . These stories are daring and intricately crafted. But what’s really powerful about them is that, somehow, the reader still comes away sympathizing with the characters . . . The attention she pays to her characters’ darkest inner desires and the unflattering truths she dares to uncover feel more honest than most contemporary fiction." —Emily Gould, The Cut

PRODUCT DETAILS
Paperback
Publisher: Soft Skull
ISBN: 978-1593767747
Pages: 256