Description: Winner of the 2024 St. Lawrence Book Award Now I'm Photogenic and Other Stories I Tell Myself is a collection of ten playfully strange and unsettling stories, some realistic and some surreal. The characters in these pages feel alienated: from their communities and relationships, on the streets of wealthy suburbs, at the doctor's office, in class
Review Quotes:
Now I'm Photogenic is a tremendous debut―funny, dark, weird, adventurous, brutally honest and also tender and compassionate. Each story pulses with a profound understanding of the human condition so the reader is constantly amazed. If you are a reader like me, who craves fiction that is wildly surprising, this collection is for you. Jill Rosenberg is a literary magician―bizarre situations feel plausible and ordinary predicaments seem otherworldly. Readers will savor access to a world where unforgettable characters balance on the precipice of either redemption or defeat. This is a writer not only to watch but to follow. ―Julia Fierro, author of The Gypsy Moth Summer and Cutting Teeth
Surreal images and emotional realities collide in this...brief but potent collection that rarely goes where a reader might predict. Stories that find the right balance between veracity and strangeness. ―Kirkus Reviews
Stories as vivid and immediate as dreams, full of dream logic and dream panic. Everything is written on the body, an intimacy that gives way to horror or to dark comedy or both. A surprise on nearly every page. This collection is deft, moving and deeply strange. I loved it. ―Kevin Canty, author of The Underworld
These stories are filled with joy and transgression, something jittery and comic that delights precisely because it names the honest thrill of childish pleasure without diminishing the true risk. Fans of Miranda July and Kelly Link, lucky you to have a new writer to adore! ―Antonya Nelson, author of Funny Once