Burning Girls and Other Stories

October 5, 2020
Schanoes reinterprets and unpacks old, familiar tales in this powerful debut collection of 13 speculative stories. The pieces vary in subgenre, including fabulism, historical fantasy, and surrealism, but all are united by common threads of revolution, female power, revenge, and trauma both historical and personal. “The Revenant,” told with a mild, distant tone that belies its deadly serious subject matter, reimagines the urban legend of Bloody Mary. In “Phosphorus,” a woman dying of “phossy jaw” joins a factory girls’ strike. The Shirley Jackson Award–winning title novella is the standout, following Deborah, a Jewish witch and healer, as she flees anti-Semitic violence in 19th-century Poland while being pursued by a jealous demon. Dark pacts, willful daughters, and young punks in fishnets abound, and the collection suffers somewhat from the limited range of perspectives, with a few of the pieces striking similar notes. But at their best, these stories are rousing, political, and visceral, even gut-churning. Fans of Kirsty Logan, Daniel Mallory Ortberg, or Catherynne M. Valente will find much to enjoy. Agent: Jennifer Udden, New Leaf Literary.

January 1, 2021
Schanoes' collection of stories is saturated in Jewish myth, punk rock, fairy tales, and the real-life curses that haunt young girls. In "Phosphorous," the striking match girls of 1880 fight to win their rights as their jaws fall apart. In "Burning Girls," the award-winning title tale, Deborah and her sister cast off to America, but the demons and fire of their homeland pursue them. Schanoes pulls in compelling inspirations, like Alice in Wonderland's twisting mazes and unkind queens. She responds to an old, anti-Semitic Grimm's tale with a bold story of a young woman seeking vengeance for her father's murder. She morphs "The Twelve Dancing Princesses" into a gender-bent, gritty tale that explores depression, shame, and survival, about men trapped in a filthy club, cursed to dance all night. These fantastic stories kick out at prejudice and exploitation, at nasty men, at fascism. The entries in this collection are powered by the quiet rage and strength of women young and old, often Jewish, many queer. They make their way through dark, violent forests in thick-soled combat boots, their wit and courage guiding their paths.

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February 15, 2021
History and fairy tales are reimagined, repurposed, and remixed in this intriguing debut story collection. Drawing deeply from history (particularly leftist, labor, women's, and Jewish history), folklore, fairy tales, and pop culture, Schanoes explores themes of historiography, queerness, duty, justice, and oppression. In the powerful "Among the Thorns," Ittele, a Jewish girl eschewing the trajectory typical for a 17th-century woman, dedicates herself instead--with intercession from an ancient, neglected deity--to taking revenge on the fiddler who was responsible for her father's humiliation and murder. In "Phosphorus," an Irish girl laboring in a London match factory falls ill with a ghastly disease but, thanks to a heartbreaking bargain, is able to see the workers' strike for better conditions through to the end. Despite this strong start, the collection begins to sag toward the middle, notably at the end of "Emma Goldman Takes Tea With the Baba Yaga." What begins as a captivating examination of the ways narrative choices, including state propaganda, affect perception and outcome, with the narrator imagining Goldman making a renewed commitment to revolution in the Baba Yaga's forest cottage following her disillusionment with the Bolshevik state, suddenly fizzles into a direct accounting of the United States' recent slide toward fascism. "Rats," a retelling of the calamitous relationship between Sid Vicious and Nancy Spurgeon, again starts off compellingly, examining the essential lie at the heart of fiction and our impulse to impose narrative order on the chaos of life, only to fall apart in an unpalatable take on the inevitable end, pegging Lily (Nancy's stand-in) as not only responsible for her own murder, but desirous of it. Fortunately, things pick up again beginning with "Lily Glass," a piercing variation on "Snow-White and Rose-Red" about an early film starlet navigating a complex maze of anti-Semitism, homophobia, and repressed desire, and culminating with the masterful Shirley Jackson Award-winning title story, which follows a gifted young witch and her seamstress sister as they escape the 1906 Bialystok pogrom to hoped-for safety in New York. An ambitious but uneven collection from a writer of significant talent and promise.

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