Winner of FC2’s American Book Review/Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize
A monogrammed cube appears in your town. Your landlord cheats you out of first place in the annual Christmas decorating contest. You need to learn how to love and care for your mate—a paring knife. These situations and more reveal the wondrous play and surreal humor that make up the stories in Amelia Gray’s stunning collection of stories: Museum of the Weird.
Acerbic wit and luminous prose mark these shorts, while sickness and death lurk amidst the humor. Characters find their footing in these bizarre scenarios and manage to fall into redemption and rebirth. Museum of the Weird invites you into its hallways, then beguiles, bewitches, and reveals a writer who has discovered a manner of storytelling all her own.
Amelia Gray is the author of AM/PM. Her writing has appeared in American Short Fiction, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, DIAGRAM, and Caketrain, among others. She lives in Austin, Texas, where she is the founder and co-host of the reading and music show Five Things.
“Museum of the Weird is a stone cold masterpiece.”
—Kyle Minor, author of In the Devil’s Territory
“Amelia Gray’s Museum of the Weird is a cabinet of curiosities—a talking armadillo, a serial killer named God, a woman who amputates her toes for dinner, a man married to a paring knife—this collection of stories is so good and funny and wondrous that I couldn’t look away from her dark and curious imagination.”
—Michael Kimball, author of Dear Everybody
“To say Amelia Gray belongs in the hilariously inventive hallows of Ann Quin and Rikki Ducornet would be to miss her light. This book is gleaming evidence of the author as a trophy case unto herself, wrought of magic equally surprising, wicked, giddy, and loaded with a megaton of Boom.”
—Blake Butler, author of Scorch Atlas and Ever
“Museum of the Weird lives up to its name: it’s super freaking weird. It’s so weird, its blurbs don’t even make sense.”
—Eugenia Williamson, The Boston Phoenix
“At times I worry that an author has maybe opted to go with an idea that is a bit of a reach, even for their many talents. I’ve learned to quit doing that with Amelia Gray and her stories, and after reading a couple of sentences, always decide to scrunch back in my chair and really settle in, as who knows where the hell she’s taking it. In what is becoming a very long streak, Gray has never gone anywhere that hasn’t amazed me.”
—Dan Wickett, Emerging Writers Network/Dzanc Books
Cannibalism, serial killing, a snake farm, and medical oddities are among the topics covered in Gray’s (AM/PM) award-winning second collection. Resisting conventional advice as to what should serve as legitimate fuel for fiction, Gray allows taboos and curiosities (including animals conversing in a bar) to hold court with viscerally affecting scenarios that rival Ripley’s Believe-it-or-Not. A delicious taste for the absurd (a man who marries a bag of frozen tilapia; a woman who births a child per day over the course of several days) results in an accomplished take on the increasingly popular flash fiction form. Gray’s 24 tales go well beyond the amuse-bouche, presenting eclectic personas with a macabre wit, challenging readers to suspend their disbelief, and mining deep emotional reserves beneath initially eye-catching material. What could be mistaken for sameness is instead a purposeful vision, relentless in its inquisitive march along the fringes of human solitude. A veteran of the small presses (having published stories in American Short Fiction, McSweeney’s online, Guernica, and many others), Gray deserves greater recognition.
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
