Unsaid Things

The stories in Unsaid Things take place in the clubs, apartments, and often on the dark side of rudderless lives in search of something more. A woman who tells everyone her very much alive ex is dead. A model whose abuse as a girl defines how she sees her role in the world. An art student who is a curator, collecting beauty where she find it. A college student sinking deeper and deeper into a dark hole of drugs and sex. Always real, always unblinking, Unsaid Things pulls the reader along as a wing-woman on booze-soaked nights and ill-chosen hookups, all in search of more. Reviews: "Blunt, spare, tautly-honed stories in which lovers wound each other, betray and abandon each other, return to each other, fall in love, out of love, and back in love again, in a Mobius strip of hard-edged prose that captures the unsentimental sexual politics of our time. Joanna Acevedo is an unflinching portraitist with a wicked sense of humor." — Joyce Carol Oates, winner of the PEN/O. Henry Award, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics' Circle Award. "Joanna Acevedo has many gifts, but the most potent may be: she is a writer who is incapable of being dull. This searing, mesmerizingly entertaining collection will leave you aching for more. She's a great writer, and this is an exhilarating debut."—Darin Strauss, author of numerous books including Half a Life and recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award. "I wish I could read Joanna Acevedo for the first time again, and feel that swell of amazement a reader feels when discovering a brave and brilliant writer and thinker ... I envy you, reader, encountering Joanna Acevedo at the beginning of a great career." — Sharon Mesmer, poet, fiction writer, essayist and professor of creative writing. "Love isn't safe, love isn't kind. Love is a four letter word in Joanna Acevedo's Unsaid Things."—Elisa Sinnett, author of Detroit Fairy Tales.