Virgin Fiction

Gathers twenty winning stories entered in Salon magazine's on-line fiction contest for unpublished writers

A thirteen-year-old boy discovers the cruelty of adolescent sexuality; a woman watches her usually perfect sister change as her wedding day approaches ; a young girl in rural Thailand is sold into prostitution to feed her mother and brothers; a writer queries the translator of his novel, who has transformed his book into something utterly unrecognizable; a young man prone to acts of petty violence struggles to understand his family, which has been torn apart by a car accident years before. From urban anxiety to suburban ennui and rural restlessness, the stories in Virgin Fiction evoke a remarkable range of emotional landscapes in prose that is sometimes witty, often piercing, and, in every moment, utterly original