Shut Up/Look Pretty

Shut Up/Look Pretty is an anthology featuring chapbooks by Lauren Becker, Erin Fitzgerald, Kirsty Logan, Michelle Reale and Amber Sparks.

Things About Me and You, a collection from Lauren Becker, is about a mailman who buries the mail, young girls with more bravado than self-awareness, a wrong daughter in a right family, uneven relationships, and beginnings and ends of friendships, with a singular theme of connectedness – its presence, its absence, and the inevitability of both.

Erin Fitzgerald's This Morning Will Be Different features a car salesman, a high school senior, a failed dictator, a ghost, an army of undead, a Rapture-ready televangelist, a hoarder, an identity thief, a dead elf, several frustrated suburban parents, and Lindsay Lohan--everything you wanted to be when you grow up.

Kirsty Logan's novella Local God is a sort-of love story about four boys in a terrible punk band at Stirling University. Local God has a bit of queer lust, a bit of sex and a lot of swearing.

What Passes For Normal, by Michelle Reale, is filled with stories and prose poems that exemplify the difficulty of being human. Whether here or abroad, these characters feel the shaky ground beneath their feet , holding on as best they can. Vulnerability, dysfunction and disappointment inform these pieces, for sure, but hope, tenacity and defiance can be found there, too.

The five stories in A Great Dark Sleep: Stories for the Next World, by Amber Sparks, explore death and what follows. These stories are by turns gothic, sweet, funny, fanciful, tragic, playful, and even gruesome. Whatever the tone, whatever the tune, these stories are all written in the language of loss: that ancient tongue the dead have left their loved ones to make sense of.