Weekend Giveaway: WHEN MYSTICAL CREATURES ATTACK! By Kathleen Founds

This weekend’s giveaway is sponsored by When Mystical Creatures Attack! by Kathleen Founds.

In the 2014 John Simmons Short Fiction Award winning collection, When Mystical Creatures Attack!, Ms. Freedman’s high school English class writes essays in which mystical creatures resolve the greatest sociopolitical problems of our time. Students include Janice Gibbs, “a feral child with excessive eyeliner and an anti-authoritarian complex that would be interesting were it not so ill-informed,” and Cody Splunk, an aspiring writer working on a time machine. Following a nervous breakdown, Ms. Freedman corresponds with Janice and Cody from an insane asylum run on the capitalist model of cognitive-behavioral therapy, where inmates practice water aerobics to rebuild their Psychiatric Credit Scores. The lives of Janice, Cody, and Ms. Freedman are revealed through in-class essays, letters, therapeutic journal exercises, an advice column, a reality show television transcript, a diary, and a Methodist women’s fundraising cookbook. This surreal, exuberant collection mines the dark recesses of the soul while illuminating the human heart.

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