How to Wrestle a Girl: Stories

[Blackburn] vividly renders the vulnerability of girlhood on the margins, revealing the aches of that time in one's life when everything feels at once carefree and world-ending. The 30 stories here appear on the page like snapshots from an off-color Polaroid--dazzling and disorienting. --Michelle Hart, Oprah Daily

Blackburn's voice is so nimble, toggling cooly between narrators and forms; she is a writer obviously in control of her craft and playing with its limitations. Blackburn can also be quietly vicious, breaking your heart with such a clean blade of controlled style that you don't realize it's happened until you've reached the end. --Lauren Kane, The Paris Review (staff pick)

These are stories about the chaos of bodies, from menstruation to athletics, from sex to movie makeup. . .With brash humor and inventive energy, Blackburn sets her stories 'on the edge of disorder' and sustains that tension throughout. Boldly styled and deeply original. --Kirkus

Eclectic and satisfying . . . Written from a distinct point of view and certainly never dull, this collection will appeal to those who enjoy experimental fiction and firmly places Blackburn as a writer to watch. --Booklist

Blackburn presents a variety of Black and queer voices in this provocative collection . . . many entries present well-wrought narratives of young women coming to terms with their bodies and sexuality . . . Blackburn clearly has plenty of talent. --Publishers Weekly

How to Wrestle a Girl is a work of stunning grace and rhythm. In these stories Venita Blackburn reminds us she is a writer unlike any other, her stories propelled by voice and wit and harsh beauty. --Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, author of Friday Black

Venita Blackburn's How to Wrestle a Girl is bold and inventive, moving between sharp realism and work that shifts the rules of form, the body, or the physical world, finding new ways to tell the stories of how girls are taught to be girls. Blackburn has the talent to put words to the things we thought existed just outside of language, but she also has the wise restraint to bring us just close enough to look directly at the things there aren't words for and leave them unsaid. --Danielle Evans, author of The Office of Historical Corrections

"At some point while reading How to Wrestle a Girl, I stopped wondering how Venita Blackburn writes perfect story after perfect story. Just know that these stories are playful, funny, moving, strange, and above all: perfect." --Rion Amilcar Scott, author of The World Doesn't Require You

There's a wild imagination at work in Venita Blackburn's brilliant stories, and a nimbleness of language that delivers unforgettable characters hell bent to tell it like it is. --Pamela Painter, author of Fabrications