🎉Congratulations to Kali Fajardo Anstine!! SABRINA & CORINA has been longlisted for the National Book Awards!!! 🎉
SABRINA & CORINA: I love short stories, there is a very specific art to them, to be able to bring forth all the elements of a story into such a short amount of time. Kali Fajardo-Anstine does a wonderful job of telling such powerful stories in her debut SABRINA & CORINA. She did not hesitate to tell us about the struggles both physical and emotional that women face at all walks of life. But it’s in the way that she tells us these stories, the beauty of her words flowing from page to page. These stories are filled with sadness but with a true sense of quiet resilience that invokes instant emotion. They are heartbreaking and strong. With each story I thought about the society that we live in how it appears so changed and yet we continue to face the same issues from decades ago. How within those issues, if we use our magnifying glass we see  a whole microcosmic set of issues within our own communities. I love that these stories are bringing attention to womanhood, mental health, family and culture. This is one of my must reads of 2019, the cover is beautiful but the words inside resonate long after you’ve read them. I can’t recommend this collection enough!
I received an e-arc of this book from the publisher in exchange for my honest review.
About this book: Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s magnetic story collection breathes life into her Latina characters of indigenous ancestry and the land they inhabit in the American West. Against the remarkable backdrop of Denver, Colorado—a place that is as fierce as it is exquisite—these women navigate the land the way they navigate their lives: with caution, grace, and quiet force.
In “Sugar Babies,” ancestry and heritage are hidden inside the earth but tend to rise during land disputes. “Any Further West” follows a sex worker and her daughter as they leave their ancestral home in southern Colorado only to find a foreign and hostile land in California. In “Tomi,” a woman leaves prison and finds herself in a gentrified city that is a shadow of the one she remembers from her childhood. And in the title story, “Sabrina & Corina,” a Denver family falls into a cycle of violence against women, coming together only through ritual.
Sabrina & Corina is a moving narrative of unrelenting feminine power and an exploration of the universal experiences of abandonment, heritage, and an eternal sense of home.
Kali Fajardo-Anstine is from Denver, Colorado. She is the author of the critically acclaimed short story collection, Sabrina & Corina from One World/ Random House, a forthcoming historical novel to follow. Sabrina & Corina has been selected as a campus one-read by the University of Colorado and Regis University. Her fiction has appeared in The American Scholar, Boston Review, Bellevue Literary Review, The Idaho Review, Southwestern American Literature, and elsewhere. Kali has been awarded fellowships from Yaddo, MacDowell Colony, and Hedgebrook. She has an MFA from the University of Wyoming.
Lemmon Avenue 