The Bindery hosts Kimberly King Parsons for her new story collection, Black Light. She'll be in conversation with Ruth Galm. Please join us!
“The stories in Black Light are grimy and weird, surprising, utterly lush… I loved every moment of this book.” – Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties
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.
“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
“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
“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
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. Author photo by Heather Hawksford.
Ruth Galm’s writing has appeared in the Kenyon Review, Indiana Review, and Joyland. Her story “New Mexico, 1957” received special mention in Best American Short Stories 2016. Galm holds an MFA from Columbia University and has been a resident of the Ucross Foundation. She was born and raised in San José, California, spent time in New York City and Boston, and now lives in San Francisco.
Please note: this event will be held at The Bindery, 1727 Haight.
This is an all ages event with mature themes. The bar opens at 7pm; event starts at 7:30pm.
As with all of our events, seating may be limited; you can guarantee a seat by pre-purchasing the book below -- when checking out, just be sure to include a note that you'd like to attend the event.
