The Wrong Heaven

By: Amy Bonnaffons

Published by Little, Brown, 2020-01-14

Blurring the line between reality and fantasy, Amy Bonnaffons's "outstanding, exciting" debut story collection plumbs the mysteries of female desire (Publishers Weekly).
Includes the story "Horse," as heard on This American Life.
In the darkly magical realm of The Wrong Heaven, inanimate objects come to life, supernatural beings move among humans, and conflicted female characters seek answers to their sexual and spiritual dilemmas in all the wrong places. In "Horse," a woman considers transforming herself into an animal through a series of injections reminiscent of IVF. In "The Cleas," a young babysitter struggles to reconcile her feminist ideals with her confounding urges, while the dying protagonist of "Black Stones" finds herself strangely attracted to the angel of death.
As provocative as they are deeply affecting, these stories reckon with the inescapable confusion of living in a mortal body, laying bare the heart of our deepest longings while teasing out new possibilities for what fiction can do.