Things To Do When You’re Goth in the Country
“Things to Do When You're Goth in the Country” (Seven Stories Press, 2017; 200 pages) paints a vivid image of the bizarre characters that live on the fringes in America’s heartland. These aren't typical stories of triumph over adversity, but something completely other. It's "Murakami meets the meth heads" says National Book Foundation award winner, Samantha Hunt. "Reader, you have never before seen anything like this."
Winner of the Shirley Jackson Award
Praise for Things To Do When You’re Goth in the Country:
"This Book is tight, intelligent, and important, and sure to secure Woods a seat in the pantheon of critical twenty-first-century voices." — Booklist
" Eight uncompromising stories! "- Publisher's Weekly
“You can say that these stories seem like they were ready made for a post 2017 election but they were written during the Obama presidency; the experience of America that many people have woken up to in the last six months is the America that has been happening since the beginning of this country." — Electric Lit
"Think of Woods as a literary exorcist, calling out certain entities that possess rural America: isolation, working-class poverty, drugs, incarceration, military dogma, and evangelical religion." — The Rumpus
"I can’t think of any other book that captures the essence of America the way this collection does—it is nuanced and provocative, heartfelt and funny and wise." —Lambda Literary Review
"Woods' tone brings a certain frankness that makes everything from the banal to the patently ridiculous seem utterly believable." — Pop Matters
"These are weird tales, well-told, deliciously funny (...)What most haunts the protagonists assembled in these excellent stories is a sense of guilt, the dark side effect of American exceptionalism."—DecomP Magazine
Chavisa Woods' Things to Do When You're Goth in the Country is part Flannery O'Connor, part Kelly Link: darkly funny and brilliantly human, urgently fantastical and implacably realistic. This is one of the best short story collections I've read in years, and it should be required reading for anyone who's trying to understand America in 2017." —Paul La Farge, author of The Night Ocean (Penguin)
