Kill Marguerite and Other Stories

Kill Marguerite and Other Stories collects thirteen risk-taking stories obsessed with crossing boundaries, whether formal or corporeal. Narrative genres are giddily mongrelized: the Sweet Valley twins get stuck in a choose-your-own-adventure story; mean-girls-like violence gets embedded within a classic video game. Protagonists cycle through a series of startling, sometimes violent, changes in gender, physiology, and even species, occasionally blurring into other characters or swapping identities entirely. One woman metamorphoses into a giant slug; another quite literally eats her heart out; a wasp falls in love with an orchid; and a Greek god impregnates a man’s thigh with a sword. More than just a straightforward celebration of the carnivalesque, though, these fictions are deeply engaged, both critically and politically, with the ways that social power operates on, and through, marginalized bodies.

Megan Milks is contributor to the multi-author literary blog Montevidayo and she edits Name Tags, a column on issues related to names and naming for the Land Line Quarterly. She is the former editor of Mildred Pierce Magazine and curator of the Uncalled for Readings literary series in Chicago. She teaches at Illinois College and lives in Chicago.