SANTA ROSA

Following her acclaimed debut, Show Her a Flower, A Bird, A Shadow, award-winning author Peg Alford Pursell explores and illuminates love and loss in 78 hybrid stories and fables. A Girl Goes into the Forest immerses readers in the complex desires, contradictions, and sorrows of daughters, wives, and husbands, artists, siblings, and mothers.

In forests literal and metaphorical, the characters try, fail, and try again to see the world, to hear each other, and to speak the truth of their longings. Powerful, lyrical, and precise, Pursell's stories call up a world at once mysterious and recognizable.
A Girl Goes into the Forest invites fans of Lydia Davis and Helen Oyeyemi into a world where "no one can deter a person from her mistakes.”

JANE CIABATTARI: is the author of the short story collection Stealing the Fire. She has been honored with three Pushcart Prize special mentions, O.Henry and National Magazine Award nominations, and an Editors’ Choice Award, as well as fiction fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.  Recent work appears in the anthologies Nothing Short of 100 (selected tales from 100 Word Story), Long Island Noir, edited by Kaylie Jones, and A Book on the Table (a flash fiction anthology commissioned for Independent Bookstore Day 2018; her story, #BrooklynAftertheFall was also published in The Literary Hub). She is a member of the Writers’ Grotto, on the advisory board of The Story Prize, a Pushcart Prize contributing editor, and a co-founder of the Flash Fiction Collective, a San Francisco-based reading series.