Prepare Her

"Prepare Her is haunting, lush, unsettling—a brazen examination of shame, wild beauty, and the small and not-so-small cruelties we inflict upon ourselves and each other. Perfectly calibrated and teeming with style, these dark little masterpieces are full of grim brilliance. Plunkett is a rare and ferocious talent, and this is a stunning debut." —Kimberly King Parsons, author of Black Light

“The young women and girls in Prepare Her, Genevieve Plunkett’s story collection, seem often to be peering at their lives as if through the wrong end of a telescope, deeply focused yet oddly distant from it. These are stories about intimacy and loneliness, and about desire, the desire these young women have to inhabit their bodies fully as sexual beings, to be seen one moment and not seen the next. Few writers capture sex as beautifully and self-consciously, as strangely and humorously, as Plunkett. Simply put, I loved these stories.” —Lori Ostlund, author of After The Parade and The Bigness of the World

“Genevieve Plunkett's stories are elegant, original, and moving, with the lyrical brilliance and bite of Sylvia Plath. Her characters are painfully, magnetically human, and her prose is imaginative—an impressive tangle with the ideas of domesticity and womanhood, and a thrilling debut.” —Megan Mayhew Bergman, author of Almost Famous Women and Birds of a Lesser Paradise

“Prepare Her, Genevieve Plunkett's debut story collection, is a book about finding the strength to embrace loneliness in order to search for one's squelched and buried self. Plunkett's characters do not always find the answers, but she portrays their struggle to break free from the oppressiveness of marriage and family and grief with such humor and tenderness, with such poetry, that we can believe again in the possibility of triumph over despair, of life over emptiness. This book beats with the heart of our times.” —Anne Raeff, author of Winter Kept Us Warm, The Jungle Around Us, and Only the River