MONARCH

by Emily Jon Tobias

Overview

MONARCH: Stories subverts the reader’s common perceptions about how love can heal, how loss and suffering can transform, and how every character deserves a second chance. America’s city scars, sewers, alleyways, and bars are landscape to their wars, as characters heal and transform under wind turbines and on open roads, in golden cornfields and with the wails of Chicago blues. Heroes in this collection are the marginalized, the sufferers, the down-trodden, the misfits, the wanderers, and the wounded, shaped by grief but not defined by their scars.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781625570857
Publisher:	Black Lawrence Press
Publication date:	05/17/2024
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	(w) x (h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Emily Jon Tobias is an American author and poet with her debut story collection, MONARCH, forthcoming by Black Lawrence Press in May, 2024. She is an award-winning writer whose work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, along with other honorable mentions, and has been featured in literary journals such as Santa Clara Review, Talking River Review, The Opiate Magazine, The Ocotillo Review, Typehouse Literary Magazine, Tahoma Literary Review, Big Muddy, and elsewhere. Midwestern-raised, she now lives and writes on the coast of Southern California. She holds an MFA in Writing from Pacific University Oregon.

Editorial Reviews

2024-04-05
A gutsy, grungy collection centering troubled souls.

More than a collection of stories, Tobias’ debut is a selection of gritty, emotional character studies. Bettie, the protagonist of “Nova,” fixates on her mysterious companion, Jones, as the two set off on a violent road trip through California. “First time I laid eyes on Jones,” she says, “I didn’t know how I would be tortured, gently, how I would come to rest just beneath her skin.” In “Red Cardboard Hearts Hanging From Strings,” Liza reminisces on past love and a miscarriage as she marries her lover. And in “Under Her Cellophane Skin,” Lemon, a heroin addict living on the streets of Seattle, converses with a lonely old man at a bar. Brimming with pure Americana, not unlike the movies Wild at Heart or Thelma and Louise, Tobias’ stories pull no punches. Readers are given descriptions of characters’ troubled mental states, which, like their bodies, ache and ooze. “Her body’s an arsenal of anger,” Tobias writes about Georgia, the title story’s protagonist, “enough stored for a fallout shelter with full reserves, but the weight, the weight she carries in pain and pounds somehow softens her sorrow, consumes any energy leftover for a fight.” Tobias’ writing has strength in its hardiness and weakens when it’s trying to sweeten, as in “What My Momma Knows Is True,” in which a child grapples with the death of her grandmother. The strongest stories in the collection, like “Monarch,” are tough and unnerving and mean. And yet the book is consistently loving toward its characters, as Tobias writes in a reader’s guide at the end of the book: “All characters share an ability to change relative to their wounds against harrowing transformative obstacles.” Indeed, this collection carries on with the thesis that each character, each person, has the opportunity to grow in spite of their circumstances.

A strong collection, better when blunter.

Kirkus Reviews