Mannequin and Wife

 **2020 Shirley Jackson Award Nominee**
   **2020 INDIE Foreword Gold Medal for Short Stories**
   **2020 INDIE Foreword Honorable Mention Literary Fiction**
   **One of Largehearted Boy's Favorite Short Story Collections of 2020**
   **Brooklyn Rail Best Book of 2020**
   
   
   The imaginative tales in MANNEQUIN AND WIFE trip seamlessly across borderlands, navigating comedy and tragedy, psychological and magical realism, the mundane and the marvelous. A criminal mastermind's protégé plots the destruction of Mount Rushmore from within an extinct volcano. A man buys a drive-in theater and transforms it into a carnival sideshow. An attorney puzzles over how to leave someone his deceased client's heart. Jen Fawkes's award-winning stories examine the vagaries of human relationships, teasing out the startling complications that arise from our entanglements with those we loathe, and those we love.
   
   
   "Mannequin and Wife is magical in every sense of the word. These stories are eerie, funny, sharp, strange, devastating, joyous, brilliant―larger than life. I loved each one so much I never wanted it to end, until the next one started. A bravura debut from a bold new talent." ― Clare Beams, author of The Illness Lesson
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   “Mannequin and Wife is a brilliant debut, constantly surprising and simply beautifully crafted.” – David Gutowski, Largehearted Boy
   
   “Decidedly weird things happen in this distinctive first collection from four-time Pushcart nominee Fawkes . . . Both creepy and surreal, these stories can also be poignant, and if the occasional tale feels sketchy—we want more about the doughty girl who can bring her sawhorses alive, even if she must recombine them after they're chopped up by an abuser—this is a writer to watch. VERDICT: Good reading, especially for fans of the fantastical.” – Library Journal
   
   “When reading [Jen] Fawkes, writers like Amy Hempel and Kelly Link come to mind, yet her style is completely her own. Haunted by war, memory and lost love, the ghosts of past lives figure heavily in Fawkes’s stories. Each one is touched with originality, leading us through door after door, where what we think to be true is no longer, and our sense of place becomes distorted.” – Patrick Dacey, Style Weekly
   
   “This collection is richly imagined, featuring stories about circus performers and twins. Fawkes has structured this collection, lengthier than the average debut, with a mix of long and short stories, all of which show her range as a writer. An engaging book by an accomplished writer.” -- Wendy J. Fox, Buzzfeed
   
   “There is a grounded understanding of human nature and the entanglements inherent in living in a mad society here — Fawkes writes with empathy and bemusement and a kind of technical ruthlessness that suggests acres of fresh graves of murdered darlings.” -- Philip Martin, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
   
   “Throughout the book, Fawkes instills a dreamy and offbeat tone that feels extraordinary in its exploration of normalcy. Each story is unique and vastly different than the one that comes before it, and the entire collection flourishes off Fawkes’ ability to create character-driven plots—no matter how unconventional these characters may be. She brings humanity to even the most un-relatable characters, even in pieces spanning less than two pages.” – Hannah Robinson, Miracle Monocle
   
   "Jen Fawkes's stories have the blaze of immediacy about them, like creatures from some other plane of reality who have broken temporarily and all at once into being, displaying the whole of their life in a single burst. How fortunate for us that Fawkes has her eyes open wide, trained in just the right direction to see the things that no one else is seeing." ― Kevin Brockmeier, author of The Brief History of the Dead
   
https://www.jenfawkes.com/