A Girl Goes Into the Forest

Book excerpt: Following her acclaimed debut,Show Her a Flower, A Bird, A Shadow, award-winning author Peg Alford Pursell explores and illuminates love and loss in 78 hybrid stories and fables.A Girl Goes into the Forest immerses readers in the complex desires, contradictions, and sorrows of daughters, wives, and husbands, artists, siblings, and mothers. In forests literal and metaphorical, the characters try, fail, and try again to see the world, to hear each other, and to speak the truth of their longings. Powerful, lyrical, and precise, Pursell's stories call up a world at once mysterious and recognizable. A Girl Goes into the Forest invites fans of Lydia Davis and Helen Oyeyemi into a world where "no one can deter a person from her mistakes."