Book cover of Wild Milk

Book description

A genre-expanding collection of stories that Publishers Weekly calls “perplexingly captivating” and “astonishing.”

Wild Milk is like Borscht Belt meets Leonora Carrington; it’s like Donald Barthelme meets Pony Head; it’s like the Brothers Grimm meet Beckett in his swim trunks at the beach. In other words, this remarkable collection of…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Wild Milk as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

I want to end with a book that showed me that parenting was perfect material for leaning into the surreal. Around the time I read it, the regular rhythm of my life included morning dropoffs at daycare and evening lice checks while my kids watched Power Rangers.

Opening up this story collection, I immediately found stories that took these experiences to fantastical places—like Spells, where a lice lady does her steady work for ashamed mothers as a strange spell takes over her own sons, or Wild Milk, where a mom’s experience with her son’s daycare provider becomes…

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Book cover of December on 5C4

December on 5C4 by Adam Strassberg,

Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!

On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…

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