Maria Adelmann
Maria Adelmann is the author of the short story collection GIRLS OF A CERTAIN AGE, which explores the many impossible choices of modern girl and womanhood. Her work has been published by Tin House, n+1, Electric Literature, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, The Threepenny Review, the Indiana Review, Epoch, AQR, MQR, and many others, and has been selected by The Best American Short Stories as a distinguished story. You can follow her on Twitter or Instagram @ink176. HOW TO BE EATEN is her first novel.
HOW TO BE EATEN (2021)
A darkly funny and provocative debut novel that reimagines classic fairy tale characters as modern women in a PTSD support group
In present-day New York City, Ruby (Little Red Riding Hood), Gretel, Bernice (Bluebeard’s widow), Marlena (the miller’s daughter from Rumplestiltskin), and Ashlee (the winner of a Love Island-esque dating show, a new kind of fairy tale heroine) all meet in a basement support group to process their traumas.
Though they start out wary of one another, judging each other’s stories, gradually these women begin to realize that they may have more in common than they supposed…What brought them here? What will they reveal? And is it too late for them to rescue each other?
Dark, edgy, and wickedly funny, this debut for readers of Carmen Maria Machado, Kristen Arnett, and Kelly Link takes our coziest, most beloved childhood stories, exposes them as anti-feminist nightmares, and transforms them into a new kind of myth for grown-up women.
GIRLS OF A CERTAIN AGE (2020)
Lorrie Moore meets Ottessa Moshfegh in this darkly playful and subversive debut story collection exploring the many impossible choices that accompany 21st century femaleness.
What is the right way to handle an abusive partner? An unexpected pregnancy? A toxic friendship? Chronic unemployment? Gender dysphoria? A family member going to war? A disability? Anger? Loneliness?
Finding themselves in various kinds of disempowering, frightening, or otherwise unendurable circumstances, the girls, women, and non-binary characters in Maria Adelmann's stories look for ways to free themselves into new lives or, at the very least, new states of feeling. Sometimes they do this by hurting someone else or getting hurt; sometimes by submitting, other times by mounting a rebellion. With a special talent for pressing the sharp up against the tender, Adelmann explores the many pathways through the titular condition.
Ranging in style from the magical to the terrifying to the calm tones of a self-help manual, Girls of a Certain Age captures the spectrum of strategies we apply to the pain of life, strategies that we persist in pretending might actually work.