Jen Fawkes – författare

In Mannequin and Wife, the debut story collection from Jen Fawkes, sharp and imaginative tales trip seamlessly across borderlands, navigating comedy and tragedy, psychological and magical realism, the mundane and the marvelous.Readers of these adventurous fictions will encounter a flock of stenographers, the strongest woman alive, a taxidermist with anger issues, an Elephant Girl, a fairy on her lunch break, and a married couple who live with a department store mannequin. Elsewhere, an American actor impersonates a code-breaking Britisher during World War II. A mother awaiting her son's return discovers his personal ad soliciting the services of a cannibal (and fears the worst). A criminal mastermind's protégé plots the destruction of Mount Rushmore from within an extinct volcano. A man buys a drive-in theater and transforms it into a carnival sideshow. And an attorney puzzles over how to leave someone his deceased client's heart.Fawkes's award-winning stories examine the vagaries of human relationships—mother and child, husband and wife, mentor and protégé—to tease out the startling complications that arise from our entanglements with those we loathe and those we love.

An epic novel about Civil War–era Nashville’s “public women,” an age-old secret society, and the earth-shaking power of the female“A beautiful spinning knife of a story that whirls back through the 1800s, the 1500s, the 4th century BC, and the age of myth to slice out an image of the pain and the power that women have inherited from antiquity.” ––Kevin Brockmeier, O. Henry Prize-winning author of The Ghost VariationsIn 1862, after a tragedy at home, twenty-two-year-old Sylvie Swift parts ways with her twin brother to trace the origins of an enigmatic playscript that’s landed on their doorstep. This text leads her to Nashville, an occupied city bustling with soldiers, saboteurs, partisans, powerful men––and powerful women. Sylvie trans lates the playscript by day, but at night, drawn into the work by the chief of the Union Army’s Secret Service, she acts as a spy. Both endeavors acquaint her with a sisterhood whose members—including Hannah, a fiery revolutionary to whom Sylvie is increasingly drawn—possess potentially monstrous powers. Sylvie soon becomes entangled in the Cult of Chaos, a feminist society steadfast in its ancient mission to eradicate the violence of men. Inspired by Aristophanes’ Lysistrata and the true story of Nashville’s attempt to exile its prostitutes during the American Civil War, Daughters of Chaos weaves together “found” texts, fabulism, and queer themes to question familiar notions of history and family, warfare and power.