Excerpt from: Freak Weather: Stories
There’s just the boss at the gas station when I roll up. All I’m after is my fellow’s money, what he earned fair and square. The boss knows it. He’s writing out the check already. “Make it out to Jim?” Bob says. “Make it out to me,” I say. He’s tearing out the check when he asks if my shorts are called hot pants. “I put them on because it felt like spring,” I say, “a spring calf.” “Yeah?” he says. “It’s been cold as hell.” He looks out the window, like maybe he can see some of what’s circulating in the air. When he turns back, his smile is all sly boots. “The weather has turned on you,” Bob says. I take the paycheck and even though our business is done, I don’t go. That puts more on his mind. Not like I didn’t see what was on his mind every time I stopped by the station asking for Jimmy. Only this is the opportunity. Nobody’s around. Could close up shop. What we couldn’t do.
Freak Weather: Stories
Winner of the Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction.
Praise for Freak Weather: Stories
There is a feral quality to some of these stories, an attitude that is truly startling. The language is perfectly matched to the not-so-conflicted women living off venison, weed, and their husband's paychecks. The territory here is sometimes disturbing; the treatment of these people who are in over their heads is always both tough and surprisingly moving. The 'action' resides as much in the brisk, fresh language as in what these people conjure in a crisis. Ultimately, the author delivers stories unlike anyone else's.
―Amy Hempel, author of The Dog of the Marriage: Stories
This is what they mean by muscular prose, but with lithe muscles, quick and bright, and dueling senses of swagger and grimness. A striking and satisfying debut.
―Amy Bender, author of The Color Master
Freaky weather―or the kind of weather that brings out freaks? Either interpretation makes sense for this imaginative, unpredictable debut short story collection.
―People
What a memorable, witty, imaginative collection this is, beautifully modulated, extravagant yet precise. Each story is startling and expertly hewn, with a perfect balance of toughness and whimsy.
―Joanna Scott, author of De Potter's Grand Tour
A powerful collection of stories about women who are unapologetically themselves―often struggling, sometimes drunk, sometimes irresponsible, but in all cases painfully human and alive. Each of these pieces opens a window onto a life and then, before we have time to explain to ourselves how we're not like that, abruptly slams it shut, leaving us exquisitely off balance.
―Brian Evenson, author of The Warren
There is much beguiling strangeness in the pages of Freak Weather, but there are no strangers: you know all of these people. They're the slightly scary neighbors, the folks who talk a little too loudly in the convenience store, the children who act older than they should. You've wanted to know about their lives, and now they're telling you everything. Simultaneously appalling and gorgeous.
―Pinckney Benedict, author of Miracle Boy & Other Stories
The stories in Mary Kuryla's Freak Weather are by turns disturbing and astonishing, blending the desire for a better life with the quicksand of situational reality . . . These tales twist until they become something undeniable, and Kuryla's commitment to letting her characters make mistakes without pausing to consider their actions is something rarely seen in fiction.
―Electric Literature
Kuryla’s stories follow people on the move, even if they may be going nowhere, and even when they take readers out of their comfort zone…When Mary Kuryla's female protagonists persist, resist, and simply continue to exist, you can't help following them, which is the point.
―Jim Hicks, Massachusetts Review
Mary Kuryla conjures arresting portraits of lonely, vexing, isolated and frequently damaged characters who, despite their precarity and eclectic impairments, resonate fully, becoming irresistible in their refusal to acquiesce or accommodate.
—Holly Willis, Craft
Mary Kuryla is a master of narrative voice. The stories in Freak Weather are built and undercut by the tough, unflinching women who tell them.
—Celia Blue Johnson, Slice Magazine
Available from University of Massachusetts Press, Bookshop, Amazon.