LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD "The stories in Black Light are grimy and weird, surprising, utterly lush. . . . I loved every moment of this book." --Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other PartiesWith raw, poetic ferocity, Kimberly King Parsons exposes desire's darkest hollows--those hidden places where most of us are afraid to look. In this debut collection of enormously perceptive and brutally unsentimental short stories, Parsons illuminates the ache of first love, the banality of self-loathing, the scourge of addiction, the myth of marriage, and the magic and inevitable disillusionment of childhood. Taking us from hot Texas highways to cold family kitchens, from the freedom of pay-by-the-hour motels to the claustrophobia of private school dorms, these stories erupt off the page with a primal howl--sharp-voiced, acerbic, and wise.


Born in Lubbock, Texas, Kimberly King Parsons received her MFA from Columbia University. Her fiction has been published in The Paris Review, Best Small Fictions 2017, Black Warrior Review, No Tokens, Ninth Letter, and The Kenyon Review, among others.