BOOKS

Strange Folk You’ll Never Meet

This new collection of unusual, fabulist fiction leads you down strange paths for dark encounters with familiar fairy tales, odd people from history, and weirdos who may have been living right next door. Among the characters in these bizarre stories, a starving beauty finds a beat who can save her village, a man eats everything in sight but is never full, a woman gives birth to bloody animal pats, and a daughter is forced to dance every night to the reenactment of her father’s murder. These tales invite you to spend time with people who, in the maddest of circumstances, chew their way forward.

Strange Folk You’ll Never Meet releases October 1st, 2021 from SFWP. Find it at SFWP, Bookshop, Amazon, and your favorite indie bookstore.

Praise for Strange Folk:

“Balaskovits’s prose never fails to impress, capturing the cadence of fairy tales while bringing a literary sense of detail and subtext to clearly loved genre tropes. This accomplished collection interlocks the horrific and the wondrous through deliciously dry humor, resulting in a unique must-read for fans of Angela Carter, Maria Dahvana Headley, and A.S. Byatt.”

– Publisher’s Weekly

“Filled with feminist subtext, Balaskovits explore issues relating to mothers and motherhood, domesticity, and familial relationships to reveal the darkest impulses of human behavior. I’m captivated by the surreal, unsettling, and at times frightening world of these horror fables. This is a daring collection.”

– LaTanya McQueen, author of When the Reckoning Comes

“If you’re like me, and you always enjoy a good tale, you might guess that you’re going to have a clear sense of what you’ve got yourself into when you read, in a likely addictive way, the stories in A.A. Balaskovits’ new volume. But you will be wrong. Yes, these tellings cast their spell, but laughter won’t keep to the usual spots. In fact, nothing is really contained. People break out of their stories. Bodies slip and disengage. Words go free. You might get anything in the pages of this book. You might run into to the kinds of things you’d have thought were consigned to the darkness of your unremembered dreams. If you’re like me, you’ll be wowing quietly after the reading is done. You’ll be going all evangelical here. Read this, people! Read!”

—Scott Garson, author of Is That You, John Wayne?

“In this weirdly wonderful collection, Balaskovits takes old, familiar archetypes and turns them on their heads, giving an extra spin for good measure. Not your great-grandmother’s fireside tales, these stories are slyly comedic one moment, viscerally horrifying the next, and evermore gorgeously eerie.”

– Lenore Hart, series editor, The Night Bazaar and The Night Bazaar Venice


Magic for Unlucky Girls

The fourteen fantastical stories in Magic For Unlucky Girls take the familiar fairytale tropes we know well and turn them upside down. These unlucky girls, struggling with a society all too often against them, are forced to navigate strange worlds as they try to survive…or fall to pieces.

From carnivorous husbands to a bath of lemons to whirling basements that drive them mad, these stories are about the demons that lurk in all of our souls, and the women who must fight against them, sometimes with their wit, sometimes with their beauty, and sometimes with shotguns in the dead of night.

Grand Prize Winner of the Santa Fe Writers Project program awards, chosen by Emily St. John Mandel. Available at Amazon, SFWP , Indiebound, Barnes and Noble and everywhere books are sold.

Praise for Magic:

“…That rarest of things: A book that doesn’t remind me of anything else I’ve read…A wonderful, truly original work.” — Emily St. John Mandel, author of Station Eleven

“To say that the stories in Magic For Unlucky Girls are unsettling is an understatement. In these tales, A. A. Balaskovits has created characters and worlds we think we know, and then destroys our expectations—unflinchingly, with no gory or sordid detail spared, and often with alarming violence. Yet, despite kicking us out of our collective comfort zone, these stories go down like pleasant poison, with language that moves seamlessly between brutal starkness and hypnotic lyricism. Balaskovits takes the stories that form the core of us from childhood and reshapes them into something dark and unfamiliar. Magic For Unlucky Girls is a bold debut from a bold author, and make no mistake—these are stories that matter, and that will stick with you long after you’ve read them.”–William Jablonsky, author of The Indestructible Man: Stories  and The Clockwork Man.

“This collection unsettled me in a totally delightful way. You’ll find familiar fairytale tropes here — flying superheroes, massive castles with one locked, forbidden door, a wolf on the path to Grandma’s house — but Balaskovits shatters these familiar mirrors and finds fresh, original stories in the sinister shards.”   –Tara Laskowski, author of Bystanders and Modern Manners for Your Inner Demons

“There isn’t a single tired trope here—in fact, there are few familiar elements at all—so readers looking for something askew from any fantasy they’ve read before will want to get to know the unlucky but determined girls of Balaskovits’s stories.” – Publisher’s Weekly

“This book is for every young girl and adult woman who have ever been told a story that intentionally left them out.” – Rachel Colias, Booklist