Family Night (Preorder Now!)
Family Night (Preorder Now!)
Now Available for Preorder!
FAMILY NIGHT is by turns a lyrical celebration of queerness and an exploration of family and loss, often through a lens of magical realism. Ani King's collected flash fiction stories explore relationships and connections: a teen girl attempting to summon her missing mother home with cigarette smoke and yacht rock songs; two sisters disputing how to care for an unhealthy elderly unicorn; a woman accidentally raising two daughters from the bones of her long-dead pet rabbits. Throughout FAMILY NIGHT, there is a sense of yearning for connection, be it with family, old friends, lovers, or community.
Praise for FAMILY NIGHT:
“Mercurial and mellifluous, ecstatic and ephemeral, FAMILY NIGHT will carry you in the backseat of a 1976 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am, through the labyrinth of the Minotaur, on the wings of a wasp-mother, through town on a porch pontoon as Ani King unravels, unveils, unfolds the lives of the liminal, the tangible and intangible who find themselves in the in between spaces, on the edges, and in the seams.” --Melissa Llanes Brownlee, author of Bitter Over Sweet and Hard Skin
"FAMILY NIGHT is a lyrical gut-punch, like being kicked below the belt by a prima ballerina. Ani King invites you to have a seat at the table and engage with a cast of outcasts and upstarts, misfits and outsiders, as they share their stories of broken hearts and broken dreams. Exploring themes of identity, connection, and vulnerability with an unmatched urgency, from magic rabbit daughters to wasp mothers to coyote girls, King's collection renders the human condition bare in undeniable poetic prose." --Mario Aliberto III, author of All the Dead We Have Yet to Bury
“FAMILY NIGHT is a vivid kaleidoscope of visceral detail that animates surreal stories of transformation, love, and grief. Family is slippery here, squirming from the reader’s damp, sweaty fingers: fathers are absent-present, mothers are sometimes-absent, sometimes-bloody. Grandmothers and aunts do the real work of parenting. We get lost in the intricacies of buildings that are mazes of the past, and mazes that are metaphors for love. There are awakenings. There is so much blue in sky and water. There are cars that shelter, cars that harm, and fire, fire, fire everywhere. And the best werewolf sex you’ll ever read.” — Fiona McKay, author of The Lives of the Dead
“Ani King’s stunning debut, FAMILY NIGHT, is a triumph of the short form. Their prose sparks and bleeds off every page, riddled with the hard, tender truths of the very relationships that fill us with love and send us spinning all in the same breath. A masterful queering of narrative in every sense, FAMILY NIGHT blends what we think we know to be real with what we can barely hold onto: worlds where mothers are wolves, sisters raise unicorns, and daughters piss on walls like rabbits. ‘I am used to no warning, used to hitting the surface hard, and used to sinking to the bottom…’ says one narrator, evoking the necessary gut-punch of King’s unforgettable collection.” --Allison Field Bell, author of All That Blue and Bodies of Other Women
“Ani King makes wise gems from the mess and marvel of life. Sharply observed and stunningly lyrical, each story in FAMILY NIGHT is quietly luminous and blaring with talent.” --Megan Milks, author of Slug and Other Stories
"Unicorns living in the backyard. A ceramic fish diving into the living room carpet. Houses giving birth. Kissing. Parenting. Loving, imperfectly, painfully, humanly. Ani King’s first book, FAMILY NIGHT, is an exuberant celebration of imagination and queer diversity. It’s wildly imaginative. It’s deep. And it’s impeccably well-crafted. We who are lucky enough to read them have in King a storyteller with an uncanny imagination and a precise realization of dreamed-up worlds such that we live and breathe each moment and each beat of each story. King is a virtuoso craftsperson, wielding nouns like nails, verbs like screwdrivers, and adjectives like varnish. A precious and intimate gift to queer culture delivered imaginatively, delicately, and astutely, with great heart and profound intelligence." --Gail Marlene Schwartz, author of Falling Through the Night, winner of NIE, IPNE and Readers’ Choice awards.
"In every home, a family portrait hangs just a little crooked. An image capturing that one family member who never smiles. Another with their eyes closed, and someone undoubtedly doing something inappropriate in an attempt to bring the whole thing crashing down. Yet, an outsider takes the whole thing in and calls the image 'perfection.' King's collection of stories captures all of these moments and pairs each with familiar familial moments of chaos and humor. Stories that highlight a lover's imperfections, the stress levels of a flock of extended family members bursting through the front door, and the all knowing (but still uncomfortable) inappropriate comments made at the dinner table. Readers will undoubtedly find themselves, their partners, uncles, aunts, cousins, parents, and grandparents in the pages of these wry and unapologetically candid family portraits." -- Avitus B. Carle, author of These Worn Bodies