The Unfinished World

And Other Stories

by Amber Sparks

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Pub Date Jan 25 2016 | Archive Date Jan 31 2016

W. W. Norton & Company | Liveright

General Fiction (Adult) | Literary Fiction

Description

In the weird and wonderful tradition of Kelly Link and Karen Russell, Amber Sparks’s dazzling new collection bursts forth with stories that render the apocalyptic and otherworldly hauntingly familiar. In “The Cemetery for Lost Faces,” two orphans translate their grief into taxidermy, artfully arresting the passage of time. The anchoring novella, “The Unfinished World,” unfurls a surprising love story between a free and adventurous young woman and a dashing filmmaker burdened by a mysterious family. Sparks’s stories—populated with sculptors, librarians, astronauts, and warriors—form a veritable cabinet of curiosities. Mythical, bizarre, and deeply moving, The Unfinished World and Other Stories heralds the arrival of a major writer and illuminates the search for a brief encounter with the extraordinary.

In the weird and wonderful tradition of Kelly Link and Karen Russell, Amber Sparks’s dazzling new collection bursts forth with stories that render the apocalyptic and otherworldly hauntingly...

A Note From the Publisher

Paperback Original

Advance Praise

“The strength of the collection is Sparks' lush, lyrical writing, saturating the dark, death-filled stories with beauty…. Stylish and deeply imagined.” (Kirkus Reviews)
“In The Unfinished World and Other Stories, Amber Sparks is a master of the fantastic. Here are stories about fever librarians and brothers who are swans, time travelers and space janitors. With each story, Sparks defies the known world in absolutely thrilling ways.” (Roxane Gay, author of An Untamed State and Bad Feminist)
“Amber Sparks is one of my favorite writers working today. Her stories are brutal beauties, guaranteed to explode your brain and steal your heart, and The Unfinished World and Other Stories is vintage Sparks: endlessly inventive, thrillingly imaginative, utterly assured. I loved this wild miracle of a collection.” (Laura van den Berg, author of Find Me)
“Reading The Unfinished World and Other Stories is like being given the keys to the mysterious back rooms of a great museum: everywhere you look there is another wonder, strange and surprising and fashioned with admirable skill. Amber Sparks is a master curator―part historian, part scientist, all storyteller―and her curiosity is boundless and intoxicating, leading her time and again to stories that will intrigue and enchant any reader willing to be moved to amazement and joy.” (Matt Bell, author of Scrapper)
“The stories of The Unfinished World are exciting in their invention and sharp in their insights―the collection a thrilling riff on history and pop culture, fairy tale and fantasy. Amber Sparks is as perversely entertaining as Margaret Atwood, her writing as lush as Angela Carter’s.” (Timothy Schaffert, author of The Swan Gondola)
“Elegant and otherworldly, The Unfinished World (And Other Stories) is my favorite kind of magic trick. Sparks exhibits a genuine understanding of humanity while expertly rendering the longings of her varied population―from Lancelot to time travelers to the prettiest cashier at Safeway. I fell asleep by a river while reading and had a dream I could not remember when I woke in the gauze of late afternoon. The Unfinished World is the dream and the memory and the river. Shot through with jazz age sensibilities, welcoming weirdness and occasionally eschewing the laws of physics, this beautiful collection is (at times, literally) haunted by its characters. They haunted me, too.” (Marie-Helene Bertino, author of 2 A.M. at the Cat’s Pajamas)