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With raw, poetic ferocity, Kimberly King Parsons exposes desire's darkest hollows - those hidden places where most of us are afraid to look.
In this debut collection of enormously perceptive and brutally unsentimental short stories, Parsons illuminates the ache of first love, the banality of self-loathing, the scourge of addiction, the myth of marriage, and the magic and inevitable disillusionment of childhood.
Taking us from hot Texas highways to cold family kitchens, from the freedom of pay-by-the-hour motels to the claustrophobia of private school dorms, these stories erupt off the page with a primal howl—sharp-voiced, acerbic, and wise.
"Parsons's debut crackles with the frenetic energy of the women who stalk its pages...Parsons's characters are sharp and uncannily observed, bound up in elastic and electrifying prose." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"In lithe, lyrical prose à la Amy Hempel and Noy Holland, Parsons's short fiction parses the addictions and desires of Texan girls and women, and will break your heart even as it makes you laugh." - O, The Oprah Magazine
"The bad-ass gals in these terrific stories are all attitude, and as funny and appealing in their imperfection and thwarted desire as you'll find in any fiction out there. Parsons opens and ends stories brilliantly. I just finished this book, and I'm going to read it again right away." - Amy Hempel, author of Sing to It
"The very fact that Black Light exists in the world makes everything feel a little less bleak. These stories are funny and poignant and searching, full of taut poetry, not to mention the long pain and sharp joys of living and loving and lusting. In her debut collection, Kimberly King Parsons has put it all on the line, with a hell of a payoff." - Sam Lipsyte, author of Hark
"Kimberly King Parsons's Black Light is savage, celestial, and gorgeous. Texas, dusty and sprawling, houses Parsons's pining, broken, twangy, and unforgettable characters. The prose shimmers into incantation. In this collection, Parsons dissects the guts of the soul, to show us how awful we all are and how crushingly beautiful." - Hannah Lillith Assadi, author of Sonora
"Black Light is a work of thunderous virtuosity. Kimberly King Parsons's debut captures a kind of truth that could pass for memory if it weren't so steeped in Parsons's voice and whirring imagination, piercing and singular. A luminous fever dream and a modern day classic." - T Kira Madden, author of Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls
This information about Black Light was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Born in Lubbock, Texas, Kimberly King Parsons received her MFA from Columbia University. Her fiction has been published in Best Small Fictions 2017, New South, Black Warrior Review, No Tokens, Joyland, Ninth Letter, and The Kenyon Review, among others.
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