The Violence Almanac
The Violence Almanac
In The Violence Almanac, Miah Jeffra complicates the boundaries between culture and nature, fiction and true-crime, desire and pain. In this powerful fiction debut, Jeffra takes us through the California landscape to map the various ways that violence emerges, terrorizes and shapes our most familiar social structures. Familiar and real, ripped from headlines yet a fiction all its own, The Violence Almanac vacillates between visceral horror and heartbreaking humanity. With a broad array of voices, these stories paint a portrait of the vastly diverse, complicated, hyper-mediated state of California and the state of ourselves, and blurs the line between safety and danger, love and obsession, victim and agent of violence.
"Jeffra is a master of writing that stands out in how unflinchingly it inhabits and experiments with abstract ideas."—San Francisco Chronicle
"Throughout these portraits of the exhausted and murderous, the carelessly angry, and the heartbroken and vengeful, Jeffra compassionately and unflinchingly depicts an array of desperate characters as they try to attain the lives they’ve always dreamed of. While the stories can be emotionally challenging, they resonate deeply."—Publisher's Weekly
"Brilliant and daring, full of horror and tenderness, The Violence Almanac gives us the American stories we need to be reading."—Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Less
"The Violence Almanac is both a deeply unsettling and insightful book. The prose ranges from lyrical to matter of fact, intimately psychological to cooly distant, Miah Jeffra flourishing a chameleon’s grasp of style."—Free State Review