“Trailer Girl has the surreal poetry of a nightmare. . . . Svoboda has written a book of genuine grace and beauty.”
“Unnerve thyself: the violent and enthralling short stories in Terese Svoboda's Trailer Girl detonate on contact.”
“The kind of satisfaction that one gets from [Svoboda's] stories is quick and blinding, governed more by instinct than reason.”
“Compelling. . . . The language throughout is at once potent and oblique.”
“You have to listen, carefully, to Terese Svoboda’s stories. You have to read them slowly, more than once, sounding the words this way and that, letting yourself interpret, not with logic alone, but using the tools of poetry–association, juxtaposition, metaphor. Even what’s left out can be significant. For these are not so much stories in the traditional sense as tangled situations, networks of convoluted yet precisely controlled language. And you don’t read through them, but into them, going deeper each time.”
“Svoboda’s tales are so shiver-inducing they could almost be ghost stories.”
“Imagine T.S. Eliot writing a Nancy Drew novel and then add Tennessee Williams’s empathic powers and you have Trailer Girl.”
“This is a gem to be treasured”
“Powerful cutting-edge literary fiction.”
“Haunting and profound.”
“Written in the style of dreamy prose poems about the alienated and edgy lives of the walking wounded, these stories shimmer and dazzle with an intensity that sometimes creates the feeling of the world as a floating, melting cloud of illusion.”
Trailer
Synopsis:
Stark and disturbing, Trailer Girl is the story of cycles of child abuse and the dream to escape them. The stories that follow are full-strength, as strong and precise as poetry.