We’re excited to share that our October Book Club selection is Leigh Camacho Rourks’s debut story collection Moon Trees and Other Orphans, forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press on October 31, but available to Rumpus Book Club members in just a few weeks!
Moon Trees and Other Orphans is a gritty collection of short stories set along the Gulf Coast, focusing on themes of desperation, loneliness, and love. Filled with hard-living characters who are deeply lonely, it tracks the ways they fight for survival, often making very bad decisions as they go. Populated by gun-toting women, ex-cons, desperate teens, and other outsiders, it is a collection about what life is like in hard places, both beautiful and dangerous
Pam Houston, author of Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country, writes:
The women in Leigh Camacho Rourk’s stories carry guns and they know how to use them. This is the best kind of fiction, well-honed, lean and flinty with deep pockets of compassion and vulnerability and hope, every sentence a made thing. If you love Lucia Berlin and Dorothy Allison, (or even if you don’t) these women will get under your skin and stay there. MOON TREES is a truly stunning literary debut.
Subscribe to the Rumpus Book Club by September 15 to join us in reading Moon Trees and Other Orphans, culminating in an exclusive online discussion with author Leigh Camacho Rourks about the collection!
