Transubstantiation

• Transubstantiation
• Price: $20.00
• 978-1-949540-59-8
• November 15, 2024
• Fiction - PB
• 134 pp.
• Mary Grimm

Presale Available Now, Transubstantiation will ship on or around November 15, 2024!

ABOUT

The stories in Transubstantiation are windows that the characters peer through, hoping to see more clearly. They’re in the real world but their reality is skewed – things disappear, people change or vanish, ideas that seemed irrefutable are swept away.  “There are bad people in the world,” Dove tells her daughter in “Dove and Ellie,” a warning that she’s not sure will do any good. The places they live hold the imprint of their lives, and that imprint keeps hold of them. They dream and sometimes their dreams follow them out of sleep. The characters are struggling, but even so, they don’t give up. “Are we dead?” they ask, but they keep talking. They keep looking, as Irene does in “Going to Moonville,” hoping to feel “the lightness and space next to her heart.”

PRAISE FOR TRANSUBSTIATION

“Tender and spooky, humorous and wistful Transubstantiation is a quiet, haunting study of characters who battle loneliness and thwarted dreams, but are often saved by their sheer will and imaginations.  A  heartbreakingly beautiful book.”
-Thirty Umrigar, author of eleven novels, including The Space Between Us, Honor, and most recently, The Museum of Failures

“The epiphanic stories Mary Grimm constructs in the concentrated collection, Transubstantiation, are riddled with essential literary ‘stares.’ Grimm skillfully orchestrates, shifts, and shakes one subdued, understated, and sublime sacred stare after another. These profound glances glance then fix, siccing sight on the now exposed mechanisms of morality and mortality. These plied and implied visions vista the tectonic shifts in each fiction’s universe, tweak the tweaks into a long, long ton of meaning and feeling. Yes, “stares” are general all over Transubstantiation, but they are essential for readers to inhabit the moment when, instantly, the familiar becomes this this, the familiar defamiliarized italicized instant.”
-Michael Martone, author of Plain Air: Sketches from Winesburg, Indiana and The Complete Writings of Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, Edited by Michael Martone

“The stories in Mary Grimm’s Transubstantiation introduce us to the seemingly plain lives of female characters with such tenderness and care that they become remarkable. Pinpointing the strange and unknowable nestled inside the familiar is what Mary Grimm does better than any other writer I have read. In these urgent, humane stories of treacherous childhoods, adult loneliness, the entwined yet disperate lives of sisters, ill-fated couplings and burgeoning hope, we find Grimm’s compassionate humor and sensuality, and the promise for longed-for truth. With an ingenious gift with nuance and detail, and a master playwright’s gift with funny-sad dialogue, Grimm offers each of her characters the kind of flawed, beautiful agency we can identify with.”
-Meg Pokrass, author of eight flash fiction collections, two collections of hybrid prose, and two novellas-in-flash, including her most recent, The Loss Detector and Spinning to Mars