"Reading Ryan Habermeyer's stories is like being given a tour of an eccentric inventor's laboratory. There's a lovely whir all around you, delicate ratchets and clicks. Dozens of clockwork devices crank through unknowable tasks. And no matter how closely you watch, from the flick of a switch to the final electrical zap, you never follow exactly how you find, in your open palms, each story's small miracle."

-Zach Powers, author of Gravity Changes

"The Utah in Ryan Habermeyer's Salt Folk is more wondrous and surreal than even its otherworldly landscapes. It's also, as Habermeyer writes in one story, 'a cruel place. The weird orphan of the West nobody invites to the birthday party.' In the relentlessly inventive stories of this standout collection, one character jump humps mannequins, another cleans up the mess of other people's spilt emotions, and still another spends her days masturbating the last elephant on Earth. Habermeyer is a fearless and ardent writer. His sentences shimmer, startle, and slay. I urge you to read this book."

-Michelle Ross, author of They Kept Running

"This salty, unfiltered collection will immerse you in sensation, from marvel to horror, sorrow to lust. Habermeyer, an extraordinary stylist, polishes each sentence until we can see eternity in its grain. Along the way, he introduces us to a world of marvels-glaciers and jellyfish, elephants and yeti, angels and ghosts-all transformed through the alchemy of his prose."

-Trudy Lewis, author of The Empire Rolls

"The crazed crystalline stories found in Ryan Habermeyer's multifaceted Salt Folk work together like cantilevered mobiles of pristine prisms chiming in a gale force wind of pure segmented light-laminations of litanies, collaged matrices, sonic booms and tectonic tangos. Habermeyer is a master mason of the 'Worry, ' a flat deadpan form that deepens after each clear-coated application of lacquered language and steel-wooled sanded syntax. The result: textured texts of high-gloss depths that suggest and then, suddenly, deliver ecstatic endlessnesses and infinitely mirrored infinites."

-Michael Martone, author of Plain Air: Sketches from Winesburg, Indiana

"Salt Folk, the new collection of stories by Ryan Habermeyer, astounds as one of the most innovative and eclectic collections I've read in some time. Each story explodes with a wallop of a premise, followed by Habermeyer meeting his own bar with flawless execution of unforgettable characters, unforeseeable twists, and profound observation. I read all of these stories with wild abandon, speeding through the pages, only to find myself rewarded time and again. The worst moment in the book is when it ends, but hopefully, this is only a glimpse of what is to come from this talented and daring author."

-Michael Czyzniejewski, author of The Amnesiac in the Maze