ADVANCE PRAISE FOR VENTRILOQUISMS:

"Like mixtures concocted by an evil side of Radclyffe Hall and a Grimm brother gone quietly rogue, Jaclyn Watterson’s precise, finely-frameworked fictions glow with a vintage sheen. Meanwhile, the contemporary world of white knuckles and bad luck is somewhere below the margins, racing like a chyron. Ventriloquisms is serious, hilarious, and highly recommended."

-Stacey Levine, author of Frances Johnson, Dra—, and The Girl with Brown Fur

“Using the conventional language of blurbs to describe Jaclyn Watterson’s collection of stories, Ventriloquisms, is like trying to describe an elephant or giraffe to someone who has only seen cows and horses.

“Beautifully written, unsettling, hilarious, breath-taking, dark, strange. In these short narratives that go off like the diverse finale of a fireworks show, Watterson transmutes pain and loss into bursts of lyricism and surrealism. She uses absurdity to get to the realistic core of violence, family, sexuality, rivalry, oppression, and possessiveness.

“Watterson is completely unafraid of the visceral, of decay, of violation, of transgressive laughter and of the profane, and with her mastery of diction and seemingly unlimited register, she makes all of those things weirdly sing.

“The writing and forms are frequently startling, but they are always getting at something profound. This collection takes everything it contains—no matter how thematically familiar—and makes it brand new. If these stories are ventriloquisms, then the voice behind them is masterful.”

~Tim Parrish, author of Fear and What Follows, The Jumper, and Red Stick Men

"One of the great joys of being an avid reader of fiction is coming across a writer who makes you question the ways you have read stories in the past. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, it’s like discovering a sixth sense, a new way of bearing witness and processing the world. Such was the surprise and delight I felt reading Ventriloquisms."

-Alexis Smith, author of Marrow Island and Glaciers

“Harrowing, subversive, and gorgeously provocative, Jaclyn Watterson’s brilliant flashes of fiction interrogate what it means to have a self, a soul, a life, a body. The speakers here are indeed ventriloquists: seductive companions capable of turning the psyche inside out, exposing inchoate fears and dangerous desires as vivid dreams of lived experience.

“Travelers bold enough to venture into this strange new world will encounter exhilarating fusions of humor and horror, a proliferation of forbidden pleasures, and the wild despair of abject terror.

“Every revelatory sentence unconceals extravagant tenderness: we can’t exterminate time to save the ones we love. Their ceaseless prayers rise from the abyss, compelling us to contemplate unmitigated grief and the infinite mystery of our biological limits.

“Yes, as one mesmerizing voice tells us: You reach the place of annihilation, and you reach deeper. . . the fog clears to reveal—fog. You cannot wake up.”

~ Melanie Rae Thon, author of The Voice of the River, Silence & Song, and The 7th Man