"Kill Marguerite and Other Stories" collects thirteen risk-taking stories obsessed with crossing boundaries, whether formal or corporeal. Narrative genres are giddily mongrelized: the Sweet Valley twins get stuck in a choose-your-own-adventure story; Mean Girls-like violence gets embedded within a classic video game. Protagonists cycle through a series of startling, sometimes violent, changes in gender, physiology, and even species, occasionally blurring into other characters or swapping identities entirely. One woman metamorphoses into a giant slug; another quite literally eats her heart out; a wasp falls in love with an orchid; and a Greek god impregnates a man s thigh with a sword. More than just a straightforward celebration of the carnivalesque, though, these fictions are deeply engaged, both critically and politically, with the ways that social power operates on, and through, queer bodies.
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