Wild Life: Collected Works 2003-2018 by Kathy Fish is Required Reading for Writers

If you’ve been waiting for Kathy Fish to release a new book, the wait is over! In Wild Life: Collected Works 2003-2018 (Matter Press, 2018), we get the old and the new and the best of both worlds: some of her favorite and most loved stories like “Space Man” or “Margaret and Beak Discuss Jazz For the Last Time” alongside her newer pieces, like “Collective Nouns for Humans in the Wild”, which opens the book and was chosen for Best Small Fictions in 2018. Think of Wild Life: Collected Works as a digitally remastered greatest hits collection with bonus, never before heard tracks!

All Kathy Fish’s work has a signature elegance, and a sort of strange, Midwestern fireflies-Dairy Queen-front porch charm permeates the pages—but don’t be fooled. She is graceful while she cuts deep. She can convey the gamut: nostalgia, horror, tenderness and tragedy in a few light-handed sentences, full characters in a few well-placed strokes. Kathy’s work has real heart, and her insights into the simple, beautiful, disturbing, bittersweet human condition are always on target. Her work leaves you yearning for something elusive, a familiar memory just out of reach.

From “A Room With Many Small Beds”:

Bobby Kennedy has been shot. It’s two o’clock in the afternoon and we have not eaten. Pearl sits cross-legged in front of the television with her cigarettes and her nail file. Her hair is set in empty frozen orange juice cans. She looks like a space alien or a sea creature. The neighbor kid is standing on our front lawn. I ask him what he wants. Get the lady, he says. Pearl goes to the screen door. Has the new baby been born, she asks. The kid hops from foot to foot like he has to go to the bathroom. I tug on Pearl’s shirt. His mother’s dead, I whisper.

If you are new to Kathy Fish this is an amazing introduction to curated works spanning more than 15 years of her prolific career. And if you are already a fan you’re going to want to add Wild Life: Collected Works 2003-2018 to your Kathy Fish collection pronto.

Buy it from Matter Press HERE

Buy it from Amazon

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