Overview

Winner of the BOMB Fiction Prize and White Review Short Story Prize, Kristen Gleason's debut is a collection of precise, surreal, and lightly linked short fiction, concerned with theft, shame, exile, masochism, and God, reminiscent of Anna Kavan, Jane Bowles, and Marie NDiaye. Closely observed and slyly destabilizing, The Wallet and Other Thefts is a book of short fiction shimmering with mystery and menace. This surreal, precise collection unfolds in a world beyond conventional time and space. Concerned with theft, shame, exile, tourism, masochism, God, and ""Nature,"" these stories are lightly linked—objects, diseases, and landscapes reappear. Gleason's elliptical prose refuses traditional narrative logic, resisting easy resolution. Reminiscent of the work of Anna Kavan, Jane Bowles, and Marie NDiaye, The Wallet and Other Thefts is a work of slipstream fiction that pulses with a sense of something generously withheld.

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9781964499673

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Reviews

""Kristen Gleason's beautiful stories drift between the real and the intangible. Cities, colors, people, shapes merge into unexpected patterns only to be shaken into place by moments of extreme perception and emotion. A fantastic, revelatory book."" - Chris Kraus ""Peculiar, metaphysical, and hilariously off-kilter, Kristen Gleason's The Wallet and Other Thefts is as much a thought experiment as it is a mesmerizing song. These hauntingly brilliant stories remind us that the more closely we study ourselves, the further from ourselves we become. Halfway through turning Gleason's pages, I could've sworn the fingers I thought were mine had turned into the fingers of a beautiful stranger."" - Sabrina Orah Mark ""This book is astonishing. Kristen Gleason's stories read like a dream sequence illuminating shimmering truths. Whimsical, wildly imaginative, and wonderfully down to earth, each story is a revelation. The Wallet and Other Thefts is a startling collection by a remarkable writer."" - Debra Earling  ""Kristen Gleason is a monumental talent. She writes with a clarity that borders on clairvoyance. Her preternatural insights into animals, people, and places are lambent, dreamy myths. How does she give us morality without rules, humor without jokes, ghosts made of flesh? In these impossible, unlikely worlds, empathy and estrangement share the same cup, and probity and cruelty live together in a kind of crooked peace. I suppose you could call these stories ""uncanny,"" but I think there is something deeper and richer at play here. Gleason drops us into syncretic wonder worlds that are both imponderably ancient and startlingly new, yet all the while, we feel perfectly at home."" - Reginald McKnight

""Kristen Gleason's beautiful stories drift between the real and the intangible. Cities, colors, people, shapes merge into unexpected patterns only to be shaken into place by moments of extreme perception and emotion. A fantastic, revelatory book."" - Chris Kraus (Chris Kraus)

Author Information

Kristen Gleason is a fiction writer whose short stories have appeared in BOMB, A Public Space, McSweeney's, The White Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. Her work has won a number of awards, including the BOMB Biannual Fiction Contest and the White Review Short Story Prize. She received a Writing Fellowship from A Public Space and was a fine arts Fulbright grantee in Tromsø, Norway. She lives in Athens, Georgia.

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