You Are the Snake: Stories

From the celebrated author of Juliet the Maniac comes a collection of previously unpublished stories concerned with girlhood, family, and urge, reminiscent of Mary Gaitskill and Laura van den Berg

In You Are the Snake, we peer into the life of a community college student, the life of an abusive grandmother is imagined, and a young woman takes up gardening. Escoria’s characters are trying their best, or they aren’t, as they bump against the boundaries of society’s expectations.

Exploiting the form of the short story in a voice entirely her own, You Are the Snake resists easy moralizing by subverting our expectations of how narrative functions. While Escoria plumbs the depth of girlhood and new womanhood, she leaves room for oddness, impulse, and yearning. Each story contains its own world, be it the suburbs of California or the mountains of West Virginia, but taken as a whole, this collection is expanding and challenging, corrupting expectations about what women can be and what they can write.

Juliet Escoria’s writing has been called ＂vivid,＂ ＂fantastic,＂ ＂sharp,＂ and ＂singularly honest,＂ and this collection delivers the ＂charged eloquence＂ of her previous work, in addition to the maturity and style of a new format--the short story--which is a dream fit for her ＂electricity that pulsates from within the prose.＂

Juliet Escoria is the author of the novel Juliet the Maniac (Melville House, May 2019), which was named a ＂best of＂ book by Nylon, Elle, Buzzfeed, and others, and was shortlisted for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Prize. She also wrote the poetry collection Witch Hunt (Lazy Fascist Press, 2016) and the story collection Black Cloud (CCM/Emily Books, 2014), which were both listed in various best of the year roundups. Her writing can be found in places like Prelude, VICE, The Fader, BOMB, and the New York Times, and has been translated into many languages. She was born in Australia, raised in San Diego, and currently lives in West Virginia, where she teaches English at a community college.