"Part dark angry fairytales, part avant-gothic myths, part surreal fever dreams, and always genuinely unique, Girl Zoo is a remarkable collaborative collection of concentrated narraticules about 56 captive women who are the same woman, not the same woman, and not not the same woman. Aimee Parkison and Carol Guess explore the thematics of the commodified and controlled female subject, complicating the problem, nuancing it, metaphorizing it so the reader sees it always anew, yet never offering any easy way out. The rhythms, syntax, vocabulary, and meta-logic feel childlike, yet the content remains relentlessly bloody, violent, somehow naively (and, of course, not naively at all) dangerous to the bone."
--Lance Olsen, author of Dreamlives of Debris
“Girl Zoo is a breathtaking journey inside the cold hard facts of gender and sexual incarceration. Taking the "woman as object" trope to its logical extreme, these stories stage a break-in and dare the reader to imagine what it would take for women and girls to break out of the very narratives that keep us caged. A triumph of the imaginal in the face of a culture that would see us silenced, dead, and gone. Read these girls, change your life.”
--Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Book of Joan
“As a writer, Aimee Parkison is what my younger female colleagues admiringly call a badass bitch. Winner of the FC2 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize, these linked comic-horror stories carry you off into an alternate dark gleaming world that is spookily akin to our own. Overtly poetic, Parkison’s language delivers the strangest of songs—she enjoys lulling the reader in a sort of chilly romantic doze so as to wake her up into a world where poor women sell their faces (only to mourn the loss forever) and rich women wear babies’ eyes as jewelry. Daring and unforgettable.”
--TANK Magazine
"Parkison makes absurd that which is commonplace by twisting it into abnormality. Lyrical and often abstract, these seemingly linked stories call attention to the grotesque in modern society. . . . One is moved equally by the lyricism and repulsiveness and can find beauty in both. A poetic and purposefully perverse collection of stories that describes a dystopian world only slightly divergent from our own."
--Kirkus Reviews
Like so many of her generation, raised entirely within the reach of visual technology, Aimee Parkison, whose stories have garnered both critical praise and prestigious awards, maintains a voyeur's densely layered dynamic with the world. In these newest stories, it is easy to get seduced as much by the sonic texture of her accomplished prose as by its startling cinematic imagery. But make no mistake—Parkison is a storyteller, conjuring characters who harbor festering secrets, lurid urgencies, and violent compulsions. Like Joyce Carol Oates, Parkison deftly works the caricatures of Southern Gothicism into terrifying clarity.
--Review of Contemporary Fiction
"In Woman with Dark Horses Aimee Parkison most often begins softly, slowly stripping away each layer of social interaction to get at what is numinous and frightening and necessary about living in the real world. These are stories both about the difficulty and the intense suddenness of human connection, about the profound link that exists between being in love and being alone."
--Brian Evenson, author of Altmann's Tongue and The Wavering Knife
“Like its individual lines, the book takes us on a roller coaster ride along the peaks and nadirs of human existence, sometimes threatening to spin off the page. We get lost in the breathlessness of the language, the storm of image—to be suddenly dropped without warning, whiplashed, back to earth: by a woman cooking hamburgers on a corpse, a collectible used condom, a raging cow whipping a farmer, a jeweled child’s eye strung from a wealthy woman’s necklace. Parkison somehow, magically, manages to marry the satirical wit of Donald Barthelme with the lyrical power of Anne Carson. With some Stephen Graham Jones-style horror thrown in to boot.”
--Necessary Fiction
“Aimee Parkison’s prose abrades, the kind of scrape on a blackboard that sends chills down the spine. One shivers long after the book is read, the reader has gone to sleep, and finds herself dreaming, not having a choice but to wake up in the Refrigerated Woman’s world. Or is it the Refrigerated Woman’s perspective? Though identified and published at an historical moment in U.S. history, Parkison’s collection proves timeless, if not gothic.”
--The Brooklyn Rail
“Aimee Parkison is a shrewd, fiery, wildly poetic, politically astute writer of fiction. With Refrigerated Music for a Gleaming Woman, Parkison gifts us with deeply imagined, and often fantastic landscapes, straight from the heart of her unique imagination, but these are always, in part, sharp commentaries on the world we have to inhabit in our daily lives. Parkison’s satirical embrace, and always beautiful language, leaves you more awake to the world and unsettled in all the right ways.”
—Jane McCafferty, author of One Heart and First You Try Everything
“In Aimee Parkison’s ingenious collection, words and images ricochet off the walls of the page, defying logic and gravity to expose reality’s invisible footing. A kind of feminist Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, Parkison’s reinvented fables, ghost tales, and murder mysteries demonstrate how absurdist extremes clear a space for the most potent polemic. Only by turning the world on its head can we see it aright: here are recognitions, simultaneously hilarious and grave.”
—Mary Cappello, author of Life Breaks In: A Mood Almanack
"Parkison’s prose flows with a subtle, musical rhythm that only prose can achieve, and then rarely... Every sentence, every sentence, is exquisite."
--Debrah Lechner, Hayden's Ferry Review
"These sometimes violent, sometimes visionary stories haunt the reader for days, and make the ordinary world look stranger."
--Alison Lurie, author of Foreign Affairs and Boys and Girls Forever
"Aimee Parkison offers a distinct new voice to contemporary fiction. Her seductive stories explore childhood as a realm of sorrows, and reveal the afflictions of adults who emerge from this private geography."
--Carol Anshaw, author of Lucky in the Corner and Aquamarine
"With a poet’s eye for resonant imagery and a cinematic sense of fractured pacing, Parkison’s stories live on the page as in few first books I have ever read. What a debut. Starkly beautiful, unflinching, unpredictable, and compelling as dreams, the after-images of this book will remain on my eyelids for a very long time."
--Mark Cox author of Thirty-Seven Years from the Stone and Smoulder
"Aimee Parkison's stories always surprise us, telling of the search for elusive identities, the quest for slippery selves and for what it means to be human, a woman. Her narratives lure us through many permutations of connection into a world as marvelous as it is mysterious, showing how fictions are usually truer than facts. Parkison is an exciting and memorable new voice."
--Robert Morgan, author of Brave Enemies and Gap Creek
"Lyrical, murderous, quietly vicious, Woman with Dark Horses is a disturbing and brilliant collection from a writer destined to be a force in contemporary fiction. This debut--reminiscent, to my thinking, of Angela Carter, Christine Schutt, and William Faulkner--positions Aimee Parkison as both an experimentalist and a Gothic Southerner. With a cold, precise eye these stories mine the darkest terrains, unearthing great terror, great beauty."
--Aaron Gwyn, author of Dog on the Cross
"Parkison treats violence, voyeurism, innocence, and guilt with imagery sharpened to its finest edge."
--Publishers Weekly
Delicate, graceful, luminous, evocative … these stories are like running a finger along a seemingly smooth edge of glass – you don’t know you’ve been cut until you bleed.
--Cris Mazza, author of Various Men Who Knew Us as Girls
"Aimee Parkison's first collection of short stories opens a Pandora's box of imagery so lush it seems to belong more properly to poetry. Some readers will be titillated by her lavish depictions of female characters who want only to be skeletal, or beautiful, and who seem to see no difference. But as with Pandora's box, Hope remains: women's studies instructors will appreciate this book's powerful insights into the situation of Woman oppressed by conventional standards of beauty and sexuality."
--Lisa Lewis, author of Silent Treatment and The Unbeliever
One of the most innovative fiction writers working today, Aimee Parkison never sacrifices substance for style - her electric, daring prose crackles with the compellingly messy realities of psychology, politics and sex, even in the most Sureal of moments.
--Gina Frangello, author of Slut Lullabies
"The text is littered with beautifully written moments..."
--American Book Review
--Lance Olsen, author of Dreamlives of Debris
“Girl Zoo is a breathtaking journey inside the cold hard facts of gender and sexual incarceration. Taking the "woman as object" trope to its logical extreme, these stories stage a break-in and dare the reader to imagine what it would take for women and girls to break out of the very narratives that keep us caged. A triumph of the imaginal in the face of a culture that would see us silenced, dead, and gone. Read these girls, change your life.”
--Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Book of Joan
“As a writer, Aimee Parkison is what my younger female colleagues admiringly call a badass bitch. Winner of the FC2 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize, these linked comic-horror stories carry you off into an alternate dark gleaming world that is spookily akin to our own. Overtly poetic, Parkison’s language delivers the strangest of songs—she enjoys lulling the reader in a sort of chilly romantic doze so as to wake her up into a world where poor women sell their faces (only to mourn the loss forever) and rich women wear babies’ eyes as jewelry. Daring and unforgettable.”
--TANK Magazine
"Parkison makes absurd that which is commonplace by twisting it into abnormality. Lyrical and often abstract, these seemingly linked stories call attention to the grotesque in modern society. . . . One is moved equally by the lyricism and repulsiveness and can find beauty in both. A poetic and purposefully perverse collection of stories that describes a dystopian world only slightly divergent from our own."
--Kirkus Reviews
Like so many of her generation, raised entirely within the reach of visual technology, Aimee Parkison, whose stories have garnered both critical praise and prestigious awards, maintains a voyeur's densely layered dynamic with the world. In these newest stories, it is easy to get seduced as much by the sonic texture of her accomplished prose as by its startling cinematic imagery. But make no mistake—Parkison is a storyteller, conjuring characters who harbor festering secrets, lurid urgencies, and violent compulsions. Like Joyce Carol Oates, Parkison deftly works the caricatures of Southern Gothicism into terrifying clarity.
--Review of Contemporary Fiction
"In Woman with Dark Horses Aimee Parkison most often begins softly, slowly stripping away each layer of social interaction to get at what is numinous and frightening and necessary about living in the real world. These are stories both about the difficulty and the intense suddenness of human connection, about the profound link that exists between being in love and being alone."
--Brian Evenson, author of Altmann's Tongue and The Wavering Knife
“Like its individual lines, the book takes us on a roller coaster ride along the peaks and nadirs of human existence, sometimes threatening to spin off the page. We get lost in the breathlessness of the language, the storm of image—to be suddenly dropped without warning, whiplashed, back to earth: by a woman cooking hamburgers on a corpse, a collectible used condom, a raging cow whipping a farmer, a jeweled child’s eye strung from a wealthy woman’s necklace. Parkison somehow, magically, manages to marry the satirical wit of Donald Barthelme with the lyrical power of Anne Carson. With some Stephen Graham Jones-style horror thrown in to boot.”
--Necessary Fiction
“Aimee Parkison’s prose abrades, the kind of scrape on a blackboard that sends chills down the spine. One shivers long after the book is read, the reader has gone to sleep, and finds herself dreaming, not having a choice but to wake up in the Refrigerated Woman’s world. Or is it the Refrigerated Woman’s perspective? Though identified and published at an historical moment in U.S. history, Parkison’s collection proves timeless, if not gothic.”
--The Brooklyn Rail
“Aimee Parkison is a shrewd, fiery, wildly poetic, politically astute writer of fiction. With Refrigerated Music for a Gleaming Woman, Parkison gifts us with deeply imagined, and often fantastic landscapes, straight from the heart of her unique imagination, but these are always, in part, sharp commentaries on the world we have to inhabit in our daily lives. Parkison’s satirical embrace, and always beautiful language, leaves you more awake to the world and unsettled in all the right ways.”
—Jane McCafferty, author of One Heart and First You Try Everything
“In Aimee Parkison’s ingenious collection, words and images ricochet off the walls of the page, defying logic and gravity to expose reality’s invisible footing. A kind of feminist Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, Parkison’s reinvented fables, ghost tales, and murder mysteries demonstrate how absurdist extremes clear a space for the most potent polemic. Only by turning the world on its head can we see it aright: here are recognitions, simultaneously hilarious and grave.”
—Mary Cappello, author of Life Breaks In: A Mood Almanack
"Parkison’s prose flows with a subtle, musical rhythm that only prose can achieve, and then rarely... Every sentence, every sentence, is exquisite."
--Debrah Lechner, Hayden's Ferry Review
"These sometimes violent, sometimes visionary stories haunt the reader for days, and make the ordinary world look stranger."
--Alison Lurie, author of Foreign Affairs and Boys and Girls Forever
"Aimee Parkison offers a distinct new voice to contemporary fiction. Her seductive stories explore childhood as a realm of sorrows, and reveal the afflictions of adults who emerge from this private geography."
--Carol Anshaw, author of Lucky in the Corner and Aquamarine
"With a poet’s eye for resonant imagery and a cinematic sense of fractured pacing, Parkison’s stories live on the page as in few first books I have ever read. What a debut. Starkly beautiful, unflinching, unpredictable, and compelling as dreams, the after-images of this book will remain on my eyelids for a very long time."
--Mark Cox author of Thirty-Seven Years from the Stone and Smoulder
"Aimee Parkison's stories always surprise us, telling of the search for elusive identities, the quest for slippery selves and for what it means to be human, a woman. Her narratives lure us through many permutations of connection into a world as marvelous as it is mysterious, showing how fictions are usually truer than facts. Parkison is an exciting and memorable new voice."
--Robert Morgan, author of Brave Enemies and Gap Creek
"Lyrical, murderous, quietly vicious, Woman with Dark Horses is a disturbing and brilliant collection from a writer destined to be a force in contemporary fiction. This debut--reminiscent, to my thinking, of Angela Carter, Christine Schutt, and William Faulkner--positions Aimee Parkison as both an experimentalist and a Gothic Southerner. With a cold, precise eye these stories mine the darkest terrains, unearthing great terror, great beauty."
--Aaron Gwyn, author of Dog on the Cross
"Parkison treats violence, voyeurism, innocence, and guilt with imagery sharpened to its finest edge."
--Publishers Weekly
Delicate, graceful, luminous, evocative … these stories are like running a finger along a seemingly smooth edge of glass – you don’t know you’ve been cut until you bleed.
--Cris Mazza, author of Various Men Who Knew Us as Girls
"Aimee Parkison's first collection of short stories opens a Pandora's box of imagery so lush it seems to belong more properly to poetry. Some readers will be titillated by her lavish depictions of female characters who want only to be skeletal, or beautiful, and who seem to see no difference. But as with Pandora's box, Hope remains: women's studies instructors will appreciate this book's powerful insights into the situation of Woman oppressed by conventional standards of beauty and sexuality."
--Lisa Lewis, author of Silent Treatment and The Unbeliever
One of the most innovative fiction writers working today, Aimee Parkison never sacrifices substance for style - her electric, daring prose crackles with the compellingly messy realities of psychology, politics and sex, even in the most Sureal of moments.
--Gina Frangello, author of Slut Lullabies
"The text is littered with beautifully written moments..."
--American Book Review