Ambrotypes

"We are all slightly askew," says one of the characters in this delightful and moving collection of innovative stories that bend, at times, toward allegory. Here's a vintage world of cigarette vending machines, Jazzercise, Sears photography studios, McNally road maps, full-service filling stations, and Green Stamps dish sets, a world where a sister with sugar for shoes desires an octopus lover, giraffes give funeral eulogies, a teacher with a backpack wormhole that houses Einstein, and a woman who places a want ad to see if someone has found her name-all highlight our humanity, its losses and its longings, and in moments, the last times we don't know are the last times. I loved these stories."

- Jill Talbot, author of The Way We Weren't: A Memoir

Nothing can really prepare you for the people you'll encounter in Amy Barnes' Ambrotypes: little girls with feet made of sugar; alligator babies; wives who grow feathers; fathers made of origami. These stories are surprising, wholly original, and go down easy-the perfect reading for our current reality.

- Amy Shearn, award-winning author of Unseen City and The Mermaid of Brooklyn

"These stories cover family, childhood, friendships, and love with hints of the strange and bizarre. However, at their hearts even the briefest stories in Barnes' hands become windows into what it means to be human. A must-read collection that bursts with the beauty, weirdness, and heartbreak of living."

- Chloe N. Clark, author of Collective Gravities and Escaping the Body

"No one aces the first sentence test quite like Amy Cipolla Barnes. Every story in her whimsical debut begins with a zing. With irresistible openers like: "There's a beach ball in the apartment toilet," "I knew what I was doing when I swallowed the glass piano," "My great grandmother hung the moon," and "My third baby was born an alligator," how can we not keep reading? These may be Ambrotypes but Barnes writes in living, breathing color to bring us captivating, quirky family snapshots that engage faith, myth, fairy tale, and a little magic. For all the absurdist delight, there's no shortage of heartache or truth: "I prayed hard that my plastic Jesus would find my daddy either real pants or a job; It felt like too much to ask for both." Barnes is adept at rendering the familiar unfamiliar and the unfamiliar familiar in these sharply observed slices of life that never fail to snap, crackle, and pop."

- Sara Lippmann, author of Doll Palace