About

In this richly imagined and unconventionally told debut collection, Avitus B. Carle turns tradition on its head, discarding and reframing antiquated portraits of women and girls as damsels, princesses, and homemakers relegated to lives of cleaning and baking and waiting in towers to be rescued or to receive a truly forced first kiss. Instead, Carle’s characters face the world head-on in unique, bold, and unexpected ways.

Author

Avitus B(uckhaulter) Carle’s short fiction and nonfiction have appeared or are forthcoming in The Commuter, The Rumpus, Waxwing, JMWW, Shondaland, and Moon City Review, among other publications. Her work was selected for 2023 Wigleaf Top 50, the 2022 Best Small Fictions anthology, the 2022 Best of the Net anthology, and nominated for the Pushcart Prize, PEN/O. Henry Prize, and the Best Microfictions anthology. She received her MA in English-Creative Writing from West Chester University and an MFA in Fiction from the Naslund-Mann School of Creative Writing. She lives outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where she writes when not observing the lives of groundhogs, deer, foxes, and birds. Find her online at avitusbcarle.com.

Praise

“Avitus B. Carle is one of the best flash fiction writers I know. This collection of sixty-one stories showcases the vast range of her talents. A writer of seemingly unlimited imagination, Carle is by turns disarmingly playful and dead serious. Formally inventive, magical, and often darkly funny, these stories present a kaleidoscopic world where anything can happen. But make no mistake, there’s wisdom and empathy at the center of even the most uncanny of these works. Carle makes us feel what her characters feel: a yearning to go beyond mere survival to a place of love and acceptance. These Worn Bodies is an astonishing and deeply impressive read.”
—Kathy Fish, author of Wild Life: Collected Works from 2003-20018

“Carle’s debut collection mesmerizes with its inventiveness and depth. These tiny tales contain multitudes: love, grief, transition, abandonment, addiction, growth, longing, aging, illness, survival. By turns delightfully quirky and hauntingly surreal, Carle plunges us into relationships ranging from familial to platonic to romantic to downright bizarre, showing us all the ways people can love and destroy one another.”
—Tara Campbell, author of City of Dancing Gargoyles and Midnight at the Organporium

“I have been waiting for this book. You have, too, even if you didn’t know it. This book of marvels and treasures. This book of magic and beauty. This book of Avitus Carle’s singular, stunning storytelling. This book of we and they, and us and them. I have been waiting for this book. I have been waiting a long, long time.
—Cathy Ulrich, author of Small Burning Things