I don’t remember the first story I read by Cathy Ulrich but I always remember the last one I’ve read—her stories cling to the reader long after we’ve looked away from the page. Cathy has a singularly distinct voice: lyrical yet grounded, haunting and filled with the brutality of being human yet often filled with a charming playfulness. Her series of Murdered Lady stories, now collected under the title Ghosts of You, have been appearing in journals and magazines for the last couple of years and I’ve always made it a habit to stop what I was doing and read the latest, often a few times. She uses tropes and truths in ways that make the stories seem both individual and also mythic—the fairy tales of the modern world held up to a mirror showing us all the ways in which we let women down, harm them, distort them.

Ghosts of You has just been released by Okay Donkey (the first book, in fact, from their new publishing endeavor) and it is a collection that works deeply on both the each individual story level as well as in the form of a compelling, unsettling, gorgeous whole. Ulrich speaks for victims in a way that makes us want to reach out and understand what lurks behind the headlines we so often glance over. (more…)

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