FAMILY NIGHT is by turns a lyrical celebration of queerness and an exploration of family and loss, often through a lens of magical realism. Ani King's collected flash fiction stories explore relationships and connections: a teen girl attempting to summon her missing mother home with cigarette smoke and yacht rock songs; two sisters disputing how to care for an unhealthy elderly unicorn; a woman accidentally raising two daughters from the bones of her long-dead pet rabbits. Throughout FAMILY NIGHT, there is a sense of yearning for connection, be it with family, old friends, lovers, or community.
Praise for FAMILY NIGHT:
"FAMILY NIGHT is a lyrical gut-punch, like being kicked below the belt by a prima ballerina. Ani King invites you to have a seat at the table and engage with a cast of outcasts and upstarts, misfits and outsiders, as they share their stories of broken hearts and broken dreams. Exploring themes of identity, connection, and vulnerability with an unmatched urgency, from magic rabbit daughters to wasp mothers to coyote girls, King's collection renders the human condition bare in undeniable poetic prose." --Mario Aliberto III, author of All the Dead We Have Yet to Bury
"FAMILY NIGHT is a vivid kaleidoscope of visceral detail that animates surreal stories of transformation, love, and grief. Family is slippery here, squirming from the reader's damp, sweaty fingers: fathers are absent-present, mothers are sometimes-absent, sometimes-bloody. Grandmothers and aunts do the real work of parenting. We get lost in the intricacies of buildings that are mazes of the past, and mazes that are metaphors for love. There are awakenings. There is so much blue in sky and water. There are cars that shelter, cars that harm, and fire, fire, fire everywhere. And the best werewolf sex you'll ever read." ? Fiona McKay, author of The Lives of the Dead
"Ani King's stunning debut, FAMILY NIGHT, is a triumph of the short form. Their prose sparks and bleeds off every page, riddled with the hard, tender truths of the very relationships that fill us with love and send us spinning all in the same breath. A masterful queering of narrative in every sense, FAMILY NIGHT blends what we think we know to be real with what we can barely hold onto: worlds where mothers are wolves, sisters raise unicorns, and daughters piss on walls like rabbits. 'I am used to no warning, used to hitting the surface hard, and used to sinking to the bottom...' says one narrator, evoking the necessary gut-punch of King's unforgettable collection." --Allison Field Bell, author of All That Blue and Bodies of Other Women
"Unicorns living in the backyard. A ceramic fish diving into the living room carpet. Houses giving birth. Kissing. Parenting. Loving, imperfectly, painfully, humanly. Ani King's first book, FAMILY NIGHT, is an exuberant celebration of imagination and queer diversity. It's wildly imaginative. It's deep. And it's impeccably well-crafted. We who are lucky enough to read them have in King a storyteller with an uncanny imagination and a precise realization of dreamed-up worlds such that we live and breathe each moment and each beat of each story. King is a virtuoso craftsperson, wielding nouns like nails, verbs like screwdrivers, and adjectives like varnish. A precious and intimate gift to queer culture delivered imaginatively, delicately, and astutely, with great heart and profound intelligence." --Gail Marlene Schwartz, author of Falling Through the Night, winner of NIE, IPNE and Readers' Choice awards.
