Overview

Winner of the 2024 St. Lawrence Book Award Now I'm Photogenic and Other Stories I Tell Myself is a collection of ten playfully strange and unsettling stories, some realistic and some surreal. The characters in these pages feel alienated: from their communities and relationships, on the streets of wealthy suburbs, at the doctor's office, in classrooms and swimming pools, in their own homes and their own skin. They wonder: is it better to be alone, imagining the life you want, as fantastic and strange as you wish, or is it better to be in the real world with real people, even if that means you might be hurt, embarrassed, and misunderstood? What if the intensity of it all feels equally threatening and glorious? In these stories, an angry father wishes he could be loving and gentle; a seven-year-old girl wants to be better at school and thin like her sister; an uncoordinated, awkward teenager is training to be an Olympic athlete. What would happen, we are left to wonder, if these characters brought their wild sides out into the light? What if they stopped trying to be normal?

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9781625572172

Table of Contents

Reviews

Stories as vivid and immediate as dreams, full of dream logic and dream panic. Everything is written on the body, an intimacy that gives way to horror or to dark comedy or both. A surprise on nearly every page. This collection is deft, moving and deeply strange. I loved it. --Kevin Canty, author of The Underworld These stories are filled with joy and transgression, something jittery and comic that delights precisely because it names the honest thrill of childish pleasure without diminishing the true risk. Fans of Miranda July and Kelly Link, lucky you to have a new writer to adore! --Antonya Nelson, author of Funny Once Now I'm Photogenic is a tremendous debut--funny, dark, weird, adventurous, brutally honest and also tender and compassionate. Each story pulses with a profound understanding of the human condition so the reader is constantly amazed. If you are a reader like me, who craves fiction that is wildly surprising, this collection is for you. Jill Rosenberg is a literary magician--bizarre situations feel plausible and ordinary predicaments seem otherworldly. Readers will savor access to a world where unforgettable characters balance on the precipice of either redemption or defeat. This is a writer not only to watch but to follow. --Julia Fierro, author of The Gypsy Moth Summer and Cutting Teeth

Now I'm Photogenic is a tremendous debut--funny, dark, weird, adventurous, brutally honest and also tender and compassionate. Each story pulses with a profound understanding of the human condition so the reader is constantly amazed. If you are a reader like me, who craves fiction that is wildly surprising, this collection is for you. Jill Rosenberg is a literary magician--bizarre situations feel plausible and ordinary predicaments seem otherworldly. Readers will savor access to a world where unforgettable characters balance on the precipice of either redemption or defeat. This is a writer not only to watch but to follow. --Julia Fierro, author of The Gypsy Moth Summer and Cutting Teeth

Author Information

Jill Rosenberg is a graduate of Vassar College and the MFA Program at the University of Montana. Her fiction has been published by the Kenyon Review, swamp pink, Black Warrior Review, and other journals. She currently writes and teaches in Montclair, New Jersey, where she also works with rescued cats and practices practicing Buddhism.

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