"Ladies and Gentlemen: I give you the Kissing Booth Girl! Lips that beguile. Oh, I promise, the nearest thing to nuzzling an angel can be yours—today!—for a shiny round Seated Liberty I know you carry in your very pockets as I speak." But to mechanically-inclined Beni, is the ethereal girl who fell from the sky a wish come true or false hope for life beyond the confines of the odd carnival called home. Her story—as well as tales of an order of deep-sea diving nuns caring for a sunken chapel and a high school boy asked to prom by the only dead kid he's ever met—can be found in A.C. Wise's newest collection of the fantastical, the weird, the queer and the poignant. A finalist for the Lambda Literary Award!
"Wise's inventive sense of weirdness and wonder comes to the forefront in this intense, graceful collection of stories in which plot plays second fiddle to quietly immersive world-building, longing and obsession are the forces of beauty, and grimness leads not to depressive dystopia but to desperately hopeful and brave, if still unsettling, solutions." - Publishers Weekly, starred review
"A.C. Wise pulls marvel after marvel out of her bag of tricks, and it still seems bottomless. Her stories are filled with wonder and magic. This is one kissing booth you'll want to buy a whole roll of tickets for. " - Michael Thomas Ford, award-winning author of Lily, Suicide Notes, Jane Bites Back, What We Remember, and The Road Home
"Wise's work brings literary together with genre, with the added bonus of well-writ gay, straight, bi, and asexual characters—The Kissing Booth Girl and Other Stories is achingly smart, sad, and weird in equal measure. A pleasure to inhabit, one distinct universe at a time." - Sara Rauch for Lambda Literary Foundation
