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Robin McLean
Reptile House
"Tonally and structurally, these marvelous stories have no discernable influences. In her debut collection Robin McLean emerges as a writer with singular voice and vision. I admire this book immoderately, and I hope that readers will find it."
--Chris Bachelder author of U.S.! and Abbott Awaits
"Robin McLean's fiction is harrowing and wry and compassionate, and always both fiercely rooted in the world and fearlessly willing to take chances. I love her keen sense of our inherent strangeness, and her heartening sense of just how important it is that we never stop trying to close the gap between who are and who we aspire to be."
-- Jim Shepard, author of You Think That's Bad, Like You'd Understand Anyway, and the forthcoming novel, The Book of Aaron, Story Prize Winner.
"Robin McLean writes in wonderful cascades of language. Her characters are carried along by those cascades, often unwittingly. Sometimes, as with the two young men in “No Name Creek,” they are carried to a happy end. More often, they seem to be, like Lilibeth in “Cold Snap,” overtaken by events beyond their control. Characters’ own words, often inept or pathetic in light of their situations, offer ironic counterpoint. Much is laughable in these stories. Don’t be deceived. Through her sly wit and humor, Robin McLean is luring readers into deeper questions."
-- Frank Soos, Unified Field Theory winner of the Flannery O'Connor Prize and Writer Laureate of Alaska for 2015.
"Inventive dialogue adds a humorous counterpoint to an otherwise harrowing adventure."
-- The Malahat Review, 2012
“Robin McLean’s Reptile House introduces us to a debut author of audacious originality. Her stories probe the underbelly of human behavior revealing the darker motivations behind the chilling interactions she breathes to life. Like all great works of literature, the stories and characters in Reptile House will stay with you long after you close the book… and will beckon you back again and again.”
--Peter Connors, editor of BOA Editions.
"Beautiful and strange, totally captivating, Another consciousness. Psychedelic. Hyperbolic. 'The world is full of beauty.'"
-- 2012 Flannery O'Connor Prize judge (anonymous)
Robin McLean was a lawyer and then a potter for 15 years in the woods of Alaska before receiving her MFA at UMass Amherst. Her debut collection Reptile House won the BOA Editions Fiction Prize in 2013. The collection was a finalist for the Flannery O'Connor Short Fiction Prize in 2011 and 2012. Her fiction is forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review, Green Mountains Review, Western Humanities Review and has appeared numerous journals including The Carolina Quarterly, Copper Nickel, The Common, Malahat Review and Nashville Review. A figure skater first—having learned to skate and walk at the same time—McLean believes crashing on ice prepared her for writing fiction. She teaches at Clark University and splits her time between Newfound Lake in Bristol, New Hampshire and a 200-year-old farm in western Massachusetts, helping with the haunted in the corn maze each fall. www.robinmclean.net.
With characters trapped by blind ambitions and toxic relationships, these stories probe the dark underbelly of human nature and want.