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***EX-LIBRARY BOOK***: USED - VERY GOOD: Very Good Condition! At most, it shows extremely little use with little noticeable wear. NO markings on pages. If used, probably read just once. Binding and spine are tight. We carefully inspected this book. 100% satisfaction guaranteed with every purchase! Item may have minor cosmetic defects (marks, wears, cuts, bends, crushes) on the cover, spine, pages or dust cover. Shrink wrap, dust covers, or boxed set case may be missing. Item may be missing bundled media. This book is from a LIBRARY and may contain library labels and/or markings. ***EX-LIBRARY BOOK***: USED - VERY GOOD: Very Good Condition! At most, it shows extremely little use with little noticeable wear. NO markings on pages. If used, probably read just once. Binding and spine are tight. We carefully inspected this book. 100% satisfaction guaranteed with every purchase! Item may have minor cosmetic defects (marks, wears, cuts, bends, crushes) on the cover, spine, pages or dust cover. Shrink wrap, dust covers, or boxed set case may be missing. Item may be missing bundled media. This book is from a LIBRARY and may contain library labels and/or markings. See less
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Things to Do When You're Goth in the Country: and Other Stories Hardcover – May 16, 2017

by Chavisa Woods (Author)
4.1 4.1 out of 5 stars 64 ratings
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Nominated for the 2018 Lambda Literary Award for Fiction

"Darkly funny and brilliantly human, urgently fantastical and implacably realistic. This is one of the best short story collections I've read in years. It should be required reading for anyone who's trying to understand America in 2017." —Paul La Farge, author of The Night Ocean
 
The eight stories in Things to Do When You're Goth in the Country paint a vivid image of people living on the fringes in America, people who don't do what you might expect them to. Not stories of triumph over adversity, but something completely other. 

Described in language that is brilliantly sardonic, Woods's characters return repeatedly to places where they don't belong—often the places where they were born. In "Zombie," a coming-of-age story like no other, two young girls find friendship with a mysterious woman in the local cemetery. "Take the Way Home That Leads Back to Sullivan Street" describes a lesbian couple trying to repair their relationship by dropping acid at a Mensa party. In "A New Mohawk," a man in romantic pursuit of a female political activist becomes inadvertently much more familiar with the Palestine/Israel conflict than anyone would have thought possible. And in the title story, Woods brings us into the mind of a queer goth teenager who faces ostracism from her small-town evangelical church.

In the background are the endless American wars and occupations and too many early deaths of friends and family. This is fiction that is fresh and of the moment, even as it is timeless.
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  1. Print length
    224 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Seven Stories Press
  4. Publication date
    May 16, 2017
  5. Dimensions
    5.8 x 0.8 x 8.6 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    9781609807450
  7. ISBN-13
    978-1609807450
  8. See all details
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4.1 out of 5 stars
64 global ratings

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Top reviews from the United States

  • Jay Outhier
    5.0 out of 5 stars knocked me down like a wave
    Reviewed in the United States on January 2, 2019
    Verified Purchase
    I know about horror. Especially a certain kind. I'm from the Bible Belt. No book has ever smashed so successfully through my heart
    3 people found this helpful
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  • ERB
    4.0 out of 5 stars Deranged plots in an unhinged but realistic world - entertainingly skewed and unpredicatable
    Reviewed in the United States on April 26, 2017
    Amazon Vine Customer Review of Free Product( What's this? )
    If you've grown tired of short story collections that focus on the ennui of the hipster middle class, then Chavisa Woods provides a well-needed antidote to the navel-gazing that masquerades as meaning in quite a bit of recent literary fiction.

    These short stories do what the mainstream media has failed to even attempt - to portray the rural underclass (and other situations) in a way that is neither condescending or patronizing. The characters in these stories stumble through life with none of those hipster complaints I see in other short stories - in these lives, there's no choice but to deal with the life they've got.

    I'm not going to go through the litany of "this one's about this, and that one's about that." This is a fairly quick read, with just eight stories and they all share the same skewed perspective, even if the premises are wildly different. The story "Zombie" is probably the most 'conventional,' with two young girls stumbling into the cemetery hideout of a well-meaning meth addict - it's funny, because it's real, sad, because it's real.

    The key phrase to remember is "magical realism." These aren't stories to read as literally happening (there are swamp gas UFOs transporting people, and one character wakes up with small armies fighting on his head) and the "magical/fantasy" aspect is a must to remember for a would-be reader. But the stories are real enough so the reader can appreciate them as a skewed window into the real world.

    A lot of short stories and literary fiction reads like it's been put through a committee - you can see sort of see the workshop mindset of an MFA program, and how the stranger edges can get shaved down over time. Woods' voice does not seem dulled - her characters have strong, occasionally deranged, first person points of view and it makes for captivating reading - these are characters I actually cared about.

    Did I always follow the point and were there "magical" parts that took liberties I didn't understand? Sure. But who cares, I was in the world the whole time and Woods' strong voice and lively, crazed characters more than made up for flaws of logic. By the end, I empathized with the "rural poor" of the book jacket more than I got from any New York Times thinkpiece. I would look into more of Woods' writing.
    8 people found this helpful
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  • Margaret P.
    4.0 out of 5 stars Inconsistent anthology
    Reviewed in the United States on June 5, 2017
    Amazon Vine Customer Review of Free Product( What's this? )
    There’s a good bit of variation in the quality of stories in this anthology. The best are very interesting while others are much less satisfying and seem to be trying too hard, much like some of the characters they focus on.

    Most of those characters are different in some major way, along a scale of quirky to fantastical to deranged. In the more conventional stories, such as the one the collection takes its name from, the sociocultural milieu almost becomes another character, as seen through the protagonists’ eyes.

    The entire collection is all over the place, just like one of the characters in “What’s Happening on the News?” It’s one of the more interesting stories, narrated by a young woman from a small town recalling events and thoughts from childhood through adolescence and into young adulthood. Her memories circle around from one young soldier to another, both of whom went out into the world seen on the news but came back again. She wants to be a film actress and the story is told as if it is a film, and one with various movies within it, at that.

    She comes across as naive and restricted in her range of vision and plagued by a lack of understanding of the world in many ways, but she also sees and understands the significance of things that are not obviously related, and has the ability to connect random things to produce deep insight into the greater meaning of them.

    A devout Christian raised in expectation of the apocalypse, at the age of eight she sees the contrails left by a plane no longer visible, and concludes that the sky is opening for Jesus to come down. Yet later she astutely observes, “Beginning my eighth-grade year, each year, one student in my school would die, and also, one girl would get pregnant, so I guess it evened out. It was a stable population.”
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Top reviews from other countries

  • Amazon Customer
    1.0 out of 5 stars Not good.
    Reviewed in Canada on September 22, 2019
    Verified Purchase
    The book itself wasn't good at all. Got half way through and I chucked it out.
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