FINALIST, Lambda Literary Awards for Debut Fiction "A totally awesome experimental collection!" --Valerie Stivers-Isakova, Huffington Post "Milks's debut from Emergency Press is full of such lovely, thought-provoking arrangements of form and content. These are genderqueer girl stories of the most awesome kind, taking the basic narrative of boys, youth, sex and identity, scrambling them with their influences (pop music, porn, sexual fantasy, teen magazines and books, even video games), and then destroying them in gory pornographic explosions." -- HTML Giant "This collection establishes Milks as a writer who can do just about anything but who will, one expects, keep doing the bidding of her macabre but humane imagination." --Daphne Sidor, Lambda Literary Review "Milks' stories in her debut collection, Kill Marguerite , draw influence from cultures both high and low, from Homer and Joyce to video games and teen magazine columns. They never sit quietly, but rather unsettle convention and defy expectation. In fact, the moment you think you know what's happening, the story opens into an unexpected black hole, thrusting you into a passage that devours and reconfigures expectations." --Anne Yoder, Newcity Lit "Wittig's Lesbian Body goes superfreak in this celebration of excess, this inquiry into boundarylessness, this exercise in genre-fuck, this slug-and/or-be-slugged fest. In a collection whose voices range from hard-boiled to hyperbolic to hysterical, Milks seriously probes the implications of social constructionism: we've made a monster (albeit sometimes hot, albeit sometimes queer) of the sexed body, individual and politic.
Somehow, happily, Milks keep it comic too. Lots of parts and effluvia, no gratuitous grossness!" --Alexandra Chasin, author of Brief and Kissed By "Megan Milks'' debut collection, Kill Marguerite , is a fearless romp through the post-avant wasteland of fictions both Lynchian and Homeric. Milks puts Shelley Jackson''s The Melancholy of Anatomy through a cement mixer, grinding out tales as sure to delight as they radically defamiliarize. Here, Sweet Valley High gets a reboot finally worthy of the weird world it built. Milks is a master of the absurd grotesque, and Kill Marguerite is her powerful annunciation." --Davis Schneiderman, author of Drain , and the DEAD/BOOKS trilogy: Blank , [SIC], and Ink . "Genre conventions are commonly thought of as restrictive rules, but in Kill Marguerite Megan Milks shows that these conventions can be agents of perversion, both glaringly porous and ridiculously invasive. Over the course of the book, Milks invokes and employs the genre conventions of fan fiction on, for example, Kafka''s Metamorphosis , and then mixes in teen comedies, young adult novels, video games, choose-your-own adventure tales, epistolary novels, gothic tales, family romances, and ''traumarama' entries, until this melee of genres interrupt each other, parasite each other, and distort each other.
The result of this romp is absurd, grotesque, parapornographic, violent, gurlesque, but most of all hilarious in a deadpan kind of way." --Johannes Göransson, Action Books, and author of Haute Couture and Entrance to a Colonial Pageant " Kill Marguerite mixes pop culture, Greek myth, queer feminism and childhood nostalgia into a gory and gorgeous mess. I got my hands dirty digging into Megan Milks'' sanguine collection of short stories. This prose oozes. This prose dripped perversely into my consciousness and stuck. Only a steady and sagacious writer like Milks can make paddling through this kind of muck so absolutely pleasurable." --Amber Dawn, author of Sub Rosa and How Poetry Saved My Life "The stories in Megan Milks'' Kill Marguerite are pure force: they norm deviance, make violence effulgent, ungender and regender sexualities. Each story is a kitsch throwback to back in the day when reading was a fun choose your own adventure; or, these stories are not just carnal, not just animalistic, not just girly: they''re amphibian, our full corporeal tenderized to satisfaction, which is to say--hot.
" --Lily Hoang, author of Unfinished , The Evolutionary Revolution , Changing , and Parabola.