Machado's star soars with Serpent's Tail short story collection

Serpent’s Tail has acquired Carmen Maria Machado’s "breathtaking" short story collection A Brief and Fearful Star.

Editor Leonora Craig Cohen bought UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, from Anna Carmichael at Abner Stein, on behalf of Kent Wolf at Neon Literary.

In the collection a fictional comet, Solo 9, returns to the sky periodically and brings with it havoc, time distortion and awakenings of all kinds. The publisher said: "Arcing between the era of the Westward Expansion in Oklahoma; late 19th-century Paris, where Grand Guignol Theatres serve up bloody and riveting mass entertainment; an apocalypse party thrown by mid-century Midwestern academics; the present day and the near-future, these linked stories delve into a wide range of both historical material. 

"True crime, cosmological panics, medicine shows, evolving queer identities, the fight for women’s suffrage, naturalistic horror theatre and colonialism are all held up for examination in the eerie and illuminating light of Solo 9 as Machado explores the complex intersection of memory and trauma."

"A Brief and Fearful Star is as magnificent as the blazing comet that gives the collection its name and will cement Carmen’s reputation as a fantastically formally inventive writer with huge range and breathtaking descriptive skill," Cohen said. "It’s an honour to be working with the leading light of contemporary literary horror on this utterly compelling new book."

Machado is the author of Her Body and Other Parties (Greywolf Press), which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and In the Dream House (Serpent’s Tail), which was the winner of the Rathbones Folio Prize. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and is the Abrams artist-in-residence at the University of Pennsylvania, and lives in Philadelphia with her wife.

Machado said "I’m very excited to return to the world of fiction, and I can’t wait to publish another book with Serpent’s Tail."

A Brief and Fearful Star will publish in 2023.