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ALU Book Club: Follow-up Reads After Seeds and Other Stories
If you loved our August Book Club read Seeds and Other Stories by Ursula Pflug, we’ve got a few recommendations to keep the last vestiges of your summer full of the fantastical.
If you loved Ursula’s short stories, check out her full length novel Mountain. This story follows seventeen-year-old Camden, caught between the lives of her “hardware geek”/ hippie mother and her sort-of-a-rockstar father, whose credit cards and brand name lifestyle hold much greater appeal. While her dad is busy recording an album, Camden joins her mother on a healing retreat, only to find herself suddenly abandoned—until she meets Skinny, head of security at the camp. As summer fades away, Camden soon finds that Skinny has been keeping secrets about her mother’s disappearance…
Eve Joseph’s 2019 Griffin Poetry Prize winning collection Quarrels distills the elements of the surreal we loved so much in Seeds into pure poetry. These are the kind of poems you want to read slowly, like running your hands softly along a cashmere sweater until your nails catch a snag that you can’t resist tearing wider for the pleasure of it. Joseph’s writing offers up rifts in reality that reveal what at first appears to be the illogical but upon deeper reflection is simply the marvelous in masquerade.
If you’re looking for more short stories with a fantastical, feminist bent
The women of Paige Cooper’s Zolitude know something about the fantastical, about finding beauty in the strange and surreal. Within these stories you’ll find police horses with talons, time machines, eagles the size of planes, a housebroken tyrannosaurus and more (somehow?!). If you’re into the otherworldly and dystopian lit – this one is for you.
If you liked the deep dive into the strange, singular psyche of Seeds
This dark collection of poetry from Carole David takes Virgil by the hand and leads the reader into the abyss of one woman’s psyche—past memories of lovers, strangers, her mother and Boschian apparitions fit to haunt any dream. In this dark woods of the human mind, the only paths leading out are self-immolation or survival.
