Susan Stinson

Winner of the Benjamin Franklin Award in Fiction, Martha Moody is a speculative western, embracing both ordinary and magical details of women's lives in the old west. It is, also, an old-fashioned love story. In precise language that dips into the sensuous delights of the flesh and the palate, the reader witnesses the love in Amanda Linger's life.

"A tale of longing and self identification and reconciliation. Amanda Linger pines for shop owner Martha Moody whose girth, sensuous folds of flesh and loving caresses pull Amanda out of the stasis of a loveless marriage...MARTHA MOODY is a tender exquisitely rendered story with strong characters, a sense of love and magic surrounding them, and one incredible cow." Icon Magazine, Toronto

SPIDER IN A TREE is about eighteenth century preacher Jonathan Edwards, his family, and those enslaved in his household in Northampton, MA a New England town he made famous for piety before its people rejected him.

Available from Small Beer Press
Read the prologue of the book at the link above. Video of the author reading and links to more excerpts, essays and interviews about the books, as well.

Jonathan Edwards is considered America's most brilliant theologian. He was also a slave owner. SPIDER IN A TREE tells the story of the years he spent as a preacher in eighteenth century Northampton, Massachusetts, a town Mr. Edwards made famous for piety before its people rejected him. In his famous sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” Mr. Edwards compared a person dangling a spider over a hearth to God holding a sinner over the fires of hell. Here, spiders and insects preach back. No one voice, no matter how mighty, drowns out all others. There is Leah, a young West African woman enslaved in the Edwards household, who is drawn to Calvinism; Edwards' young cousins Joseph and Elisha, whose father kills himself in fear for his soul; and Sarah, Edwards' wife, who is visited by ecstasy. Ordinary grace, human failings and extraordinary convictions combine in unexpected ways to animate this old New England tale.

Venus of Chalk is by turns tender and ruthless, dark and funny, haunting and starkly contemporary. In spare, eloquent prose Stinson mines depths most writers shy away from.   This is one ride you won't want to miss.

-- Alison Smith, author, Name All the Animals

Poetry and lyric essays about fatness. Now available at Book Moon Books!

Link: Lavender Review

Letters by Queer Writers to Their Younger Selves. 64 authors, including Gregory Maguire, David Leavitt, Jewelle Gomez, Susan Stinson. Half the proceeds go to The Trevor Project.