Miracles Come on Mondays

“These dark fractured fables tell stories of strange texture; stories about characters trying to find their way amid currents both small and large in a world in which personal and spiritual intimacy feel dangerously compromised. They are philosophical, funny, and frank. Like the fictions of Fanny Howe, Italo Calvino, and Rikki Ducournet, Cray's stories rarely comfort. Then again, as one narrator observes, ‘When some alien sensation rises in the body, it unsettles rather than clarifies.’” –Kazim Ali Not since Dodgson’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has a debut felt so consummate, so fully achieved, so necessary, and welcome. Penelope Cray’s Miracles Come on Mondays is part koan and part fable for days of the week on a calendar whose blithely inviting squares open like doors inside of which we shrink and grow. It is a dark comedy of domestic manners, and a collection of detective tales whose mystery is desire or god or the body at odds with and “wed” to its Self. A bed begins its nighttime routine without its person; a dead brother hides in a freckle at the base of his sister’s knee; and, the kindest, most gentle ear in the world is that of an ant. Here are weird dramas rendered with assuredness and without aversion: this book is beautifully, gloriously perverse. It is hilarious, and it is terrifying. —Mary Cappello