Stan

Fiction. STAN puts the reader quickly into the throes of fresh madness, with a voice as committed to lyrical beauty as it is to understanding our species' basest, most persistent desires. The titular object of affection is just one of the many subjects that its narrator yearns for, as she confesses her shame, desire, and humiliations with a rigor and insight that will make Marream Krollos, author also of FC2's Big City, an author worth following for years to come.

This is a report from a wound that is a kaleidoscope. Written from the outpost of the female body--which is at least here to say a threatened, denigrated, unfairly framed place--Krollos suggests (in a lineage with Qiu Miaojin, Christine Angot...) that obsession, yearning, and unashamed negativity, too, are antidotes to the popular sentence. Perfect as novella, this packet of restless anguish is a good look at what the world looks like from something stung.--Caren Beilin

According to the narrator of Marream Krollos's STAN, if you stare at your lips long enough, 'they eventually begin to look like foreign things and not like lips at all. They become a shape you are interested in, a shape you might want to understand with your mouth.' Likewise with this novel, which stares down your assumptions about what is good and what is bad, about what is pretty and what is ugly, about what is worth loving and what is not. Until nothing looks, sounds, feels, smells or tastes the same: a place to begin (gently, softly) again. I would call this a beautiful and moving book, if such words were still available.--Elisabeth Sheffield

Bleak, terribly terribly beautiful and absolutely modern, Marream Krollos' STAN is an exquisite and original cri de couer, written in blood and flesh, with sentences that explode like grenades, piercing our hearts with fine glass shrapnel.--Jeffrey DeShell