The Ill-Fitting Skin —Winner of the Press 53 Award for Short Fiction
The Ill-Fitting Skin is layered with surreal story telling but remains an extraordinarily realistic read, in the sense that even the most solid realities of life—and death—tend to blur and shimmer at their raw edges. The talkative bird that nests in a woman’s womb is as real as the “previous tenant.” The love of a mother for her uncontrollable son is as real as the wildness that is in her too. The women of The Ill-Fitting Skin are real women—who work and grieve and create and destroy, who love and do not love, whether at the roll of the dice or because “the pages are paths, and you will have to choose among them.”
Early Praise for The Ill-Fitting Skin
With sharp insight, and heartbreaking humor, Shannon Robinson’s stunning debut story collection explores desire, motherhood, and the way that every connection a woman makes can become both a way to be seen and a way to disappear. Robinson shifts seamlessly between approaching the world with a visceral clarity and building fantasy worlds that illuminate the strangeness of our own. The Ill-Fitting Skin is a biting, breathtaking catalogue of the many ways being a human can feel beastly.
—Danielle Evans, author of Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self and The Office of Historical Corrections
In The Ill-Fitting Skin, weirdness isn’t just an affectation. These aren’t the same familiar domestic stories dressed up in a quirky thrift store fur coat or trying out a funny accent. What makes the book so satisfying and brilliant is that it’s weird all the way down to the atoms, taking nothing about Robinson’s obsessions—motherhood, girlhood—for granted. And yet, somehow, these stories are no less heartfelt for being so dazzlingly and subversively constructed. I’m amazed by (and, frankly, envious of) what Robinson has achieved.
-Holly Goddard Jones, author of The Next Time You See Me, The Salt Line, and Antipodes: Stories
The stories in The Ill-Fitting Skin are funny, unflinching, and strange. The mundane and the magical rub together until they're transformed into pearls in Shannon Robinson’s sharp and lucid prose. Mordant and morbid, these stories will stay with you and take up residence in a dark chamber of your heart.
—Katya Apekina, author of The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish and Mother Doll
Shannon Robinson’s wild imagination and dizzying range are on full display in her knockout debut, The Ill-Fitting Skin. In these stories, women give birth to rabbits, struggle with adolescent werewolf boys, deal with shitty jobs, micropenises, and Alzheimer's; finish one story and you’ll have no idea what comes next. But Robinson, with razor-sharp humor and tremendous heart, keeps us grounded with the messy humanity of her beautifully drawn characters. A cross between Karen Russell and Lorrie Moore, mixed with Dungeons & Dragons and Choose-Your-Own-Adventure, The Ill-Fitting Skin—and every story in it—is utterly its own thing: a dream, a disruption, a question, a wonder.
—Lysley Tenorio, author of Monstress and The Son of Good Fortune
Clever, harrowing, bitingly funny, imaginative, absurd, anatomical, and wise, these stories expertly shift from the magical realms of werewolves and zombies to the stark realities of trying to claw out a semblance of existence one can live with. Robinson's inventive tales are sure to delight admirers of Kelly Link and Aimee Bender.
—Melinda Moustakis, author of Homestead and Bear Down, Bear North: Alaska Stories
Shannon Robinson is a writer so stylistically nimble, so protean, she can move with blithe grace from the fabulist to the brightly-lit realist, from werewolves to a dead pet portrait artist, from choose your own adventure to a zombie parade, and all of it keen-eyed and psychologically astute. Like Angela Carter, she enstranges the world so that you can glimpse fresh and essential truths about the competing impulses at the heart of human behavior. Robinson’s sensibility is characterized by a wild wryness, a knowing side-long glance at the world, that cannot help but eventually yield to grudging tenderness. And all the while her characters are just trying to lay claim to some tiny scrap of agency to anchor them, however provisionally, amidst the everyday squall that is living. A brilliant debut.
-Kellie Wells, author of Skin, Compression Scars, and Fat Girl, Terrestrial
