{"product_id":"a-manual-for-how-to-love-us-stories-isbn-9780063230880","title":"A Manual for How to Love Us: Stories","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eA debut, interlinked collection of stories exploring the primal nature of women’s grief—offering insight into the profound experience of loss and the absurd ways in which we seek control in an unruly world.\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSeamlessly shifting between the speculative and the blindingly real, balancing the bizarre with the subtle brutality of the mundane, \u003cem\u003eA Manual for How to Love Us\u003c\/em\u003e is a tender portrait of women trying their best to survive, love, and find genuine meaning in the aftermath of loss.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn these unconventional and unpredictably connected stories, Erin Slaughter shatters the stereotype of the soft-spoken, sorrowful woman in distress, queering the domestic and honoring the feral in all of us. In each story, grieving women embrace their wildest impulses as they attempt to master their lives: one woman becomes a “gazer” at a fraternity house, another slowly moves into her otherworldly stained-glass art, a couple speaks only in their basement’s black box, and a thruple must decide what to do when one partner disappears.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe women in Erin Slaughter’s stories suffer messy breaks, whisper secrets to the ghosts tangled in the knots of their hair, eat raw meat to commune with their inner wolves, and build deadly MLM schemes along the Gulf Coast.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSet across oft-overlooked towns in the American South, \u003cem\u003eA Manual for How to Love Us\u003c\/em\u003e spotlights women who are living on the brink and clinging to its precipitous edge. Lyrical and surprisingly humorous, \u003cem\u003eA Manual for How to Love Us\u003c\/em\u003e is an exciting debut that reveals the sticky complications of living in a body, in all its grotesquerie and glory.\u003c\/p\u003e | \u003cp\u003e“Slaughter admirably conveys a heightened awareness of how we harbor within our tamed lives an undeniable wildness.”— - \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eLibrary Journal\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“[A] gritty debut fiction collection…[readers] will appreciate Slaughter’s storytelling chops.”— - \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"With a poet’s lyricism, Erin Slaughter crafts a debut collection that is speculative, dark, and thoroughly feral.\" - \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eElectric Literature\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"This deeply imagined, brilliantly ferocious debut collection sits perfectly among the fiction of Danielle Lazarin and Kelly Link. \u003cem\u003eA Manual for How to Love Us\u003c\/em\u003e lays bare the power and wildness of grief. It is unequivocally one of the best debut collections I’ve read in years.\"  - \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003ePeter Kispert, author of I Know You Know Who I Am\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"\u003cem\u003eA Manual for How to Love Us \u003c\/em\u003eis a collection that reads like a wolf howl, every page alive with longing and hunger and desire and rage. Erin Slaughter writes with tenderness—capturing the sweet intimacies of friendship, of kindness in unexpected places—but also with an unflinching eye for the pain that connects us, shapes us, makes us who we are. This is prose from a poet’s heart.\" - \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eAllegra Hyde, author of Eleutheria\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Erin Slaughter’s debut collection, \u003cem\u003eA Manual for How to Love Us\u003c\/em\u003e, is an evocative mix of strange realism and Bachelardian obsession. Slaughter is a gifted stylist who can instill the most mundane objects with profound meaning and depth. In her world, a tongue is never only a tongue, a thorn far more than a thorn, and even a fly–buzzing alone in a bedroom–harbors the impact of a father.” - \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eIsle McElroy, author of The Atmospherians and People Collide\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Stunningly fierce … Slaughter intentionally blurs the line between real and unreal and ghosts and people, creating a spellbinding tilt across stories and worlds. This dark but whimsical collection is perfect for fans of magical realism and strong female characters.\" - \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eBooklist\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“The stories in \u003cem\u003eA Manual for How to Love Us\u003c\/em\u003e read like a cold ocean swim: salty and refreshing and sincere, each a bracing exploration of the particular blessings and burdens of womanhood in all its ugliness and glory. I couldn’t ask for something stranger or more beautiful. Erin Slaughter is a masterful sentence writer in firm command of her craft, and this book is an inspiration and a gift.” - \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eJulia Fine, author of The Upstairs House and What Should Be Wild\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Harper Perennial","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44890386825445,"sku":"NP9780063230880","price":18.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780063230880.jpg?v=1730233166","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/a-manual-for-how-to-love-us-stories-isbn-9780063230880","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}