With her novels, Sugar Run and Perpetual West, Mesha Maren was deemed a “highest-order storyteller of Southern noir” (Electric Literature). She perperuats such status with Shae, both an intimate, heartbreaking, and honest portrayal of the West Virginia of her upbringing and a captivating coming-of-age story of queer identity, early parenthood, and addiction. Garrard Conley, author of Boy Erased and All the World Beside, said, “This book is essential for the new queer canon emerging from Southern writers. I can’t wait to put this in the hands of so many people who need it and will no doubt see themselves in this beautiful narrative.”
Publication date for Shae is May 21, retailing at $27.
From publicity:
When 16-year-old Shae meets newcomer Cam, the two become fast friends, and then much more. After Shae gets pregnant and their daughter is born via a traumatic C-section, she’s given opioids to manage the pain. Her days soon begin to revolve around obtaining pills, and she slips further from her loved ones and herself. Simultaneously, Cam is coming into herself, building a feminine identity and undergoing a transition that Shae, while supportive, cannot fully understand.
In the heart of West Virginia, opioids are dispensed as freely as candy, and the community is largely hostile toward trans people. It is, however, the only home Shae and Cam know. Shae is as much about these women as it is about this home they both love, even when it doesn’t always love them back.
“My research and writing are focused on the intersections of identity and landscape and rooted in the question of how the specific place where a person is born and raised impacts them; how the very shapes of the hills and trees anchor themselves inside us and form our first vocabulary,” Maren said in the book’s release announcement.
Mesha Maren is the author of the novels Sugar Run and Perpetual West (Algonquin Books). Her short stories and essays can be read in Tin House, The Oxford American, The Guardian, Crazyhorse, Triquarterly, The Southern Review, Ecotone, Sou’wester, Hobart, Forty Stories: New Writing from Harper Perennial, and elsewhere. She was the recipient of the 2015 Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize, a 2014 Elizabeth George Foundation grant, an Appalachian Writing Fellowship from Lincoln Memorial University, and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Ucross Foundation. She was the 2018-2019 Kenan Visiting Writer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is an Associate Professor of the Practice of English at Duke University.
—From staff reports
