How to Wrestle a Girl: Stories
Sep 2021 · MCD x FSG Originals
5.0star
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Ebook
224
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About this ebook
A daring and darkly humorous exploration of girlhood, queerness, and coming of age in Southern California.
Finalist for the 2022 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction and the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, and longlisted for the 2022 Joyce Carol Oates Prize, How to Wrestle a Girl is a bold collection of stories from a rising literary star. Venita Blackburn's characters navigate the complexities of growing up as Black girls in Southern California, their voices stark, sharp, and unflinchingly honest.
In the aftermath of her father's death, a teenage girl grapples with her burgeoning queerness and changing body while fending off the advances and failures of the adults around her. From biology class to church, wrestling matches to arm wrestling, Blackburn captures the raw vulnerability and fierceness of girlhood.
Shaking loose a vision of Black girlhood that is bruised yet resilient, hilarious and ominous, Blackburn masterfully crafts a collection that is at once hyper-local and universal. How to Wrestle a Girl shines in its propensity to magnify small moments, challenge presumptions, and dissect the wonder and danger of growing up in a world that often fails to protect Black girls.
Finalist for the 2022 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction and the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, and longlisted for the 2022 Joyce Carol Oates Prize, How to Wrestle a Girl is a bold collection of stories from a rising literary star. Venita Blackburn's characters navigate the complexities of growing up as Black girls in Southern California, their voices stark, sharp, and unflinchingly honest.
In the aftermath of her father's death, a teenage girl grapples with her burgeoning queerness and changing body while fending off the advances and failures of the adults around her. From biology class to church, wrestling matches to arm wrestling, Blackburn captures the raw vulnerability and fierceness of girlhood.
Shaking loose a vision of Black girlhood that is bruised yet resilient, hilarious and ominous, Blackburn masterfully crafts a collection that is at once hyper-local and universal. How to Wrestle a Girl shines in its propensity to magnify small moments, challenge presumptions, and dissect the wonder and danger of growing up in a world that often fails to protect Black girls.
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5.0
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About the author
Venita Blackburn is the author of the story collection Black Jesus and Other Superheroes, which won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize and was a finalist for the 2018 Young Lions Fiction Award and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker online, The Paris Review, Pleiades, Madison Review, Bat City Review, American Short Fiction, and Bellevue Literary Review. She is a faculty member in the creative writing program at Fresno State University and the founder and president of Live, Write, an organization devoted to offering free creative writing workshops for communities of color.
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