H & G

“In H & G, Anna Maria Hong brilliantly re-visions the ‘Hansel and Gretel’ fairytale for the post-post-modern 21st century. Or explodes it, producing a text brimming with biting wit, feminist insight, psychological incisiveness, and a hybrid narrative daring that turns genre on its head. G., a ‘Korean American fraülein’ who is ‘sick of the high road’ is willing to tear the whole fantasy edifice of our illusions down as she journeys toward deeper truths, and thankfully, she and H. take us along for their sometimes-frightening, always enlightening rides.”—John Keene, author of Counternarratives

“H & G is more than a fractured fairy tale for the Doom Generation. It’s a mordantly funny dismantling of loss and abandonment, a game of Chutes & Ladders played by Angela Carter and the Woolf of Orlando, a spider that waits for its victim to stop struggling before moving in. It suggests that the great escape is just the prelude to an unhappily ever after in which old traumas collapse under the weight of new discoveries. It is a brilliant, bracing book.”—Josh Emmons, author of A Moral Tale and Other Moral Tales and The Loss of Leon Meed

“This prose, built closely beside one of the most primeval European tales, is full of delectably strong phrasal nuggets and more. Anna Maria Hong unfastens and opens the original narrative, filling in all the icy distress that we already know, then adds the allure of burning sugar.”—Stacey Levine, author of The Girl With Brown Fur and Frances Johnson