Alex Behr
is the featured author from The Gravity of the Thing’s Summer 2017 issue and the author of the short story collection Planet Grim (7.13 Books, 2017).
Click here to read Behr’s LitReactor piece about “Angel Dust”, a flash fiction from her collection that first appeared at The Gravity of the Thing.
Click here to read “If My Book: Planet Grim” at Monkeybicycle.
Click here to read “Heavy Levity: Courtney Harler Review’s Alex Behr’s Planet Grim” at Chicago Literari.
Click here to read Mom Egg‘s book review of Planet Grim.
Click here to read a book review from Shelf Stalker.
Click here to read an author interview at Grab the Lapels.
Click here to read an author interview at Thoughtful Dog.
Click here to order at Powell’s City of Books.
A woman muses on the influential men in her life, and the enduring significance of white pants. A grisly trial for a murder in which a son witnessed his mother’s stabbing forces a juror to come to terms with the absence of her missionary son. A young father tries to resist lusting after his adoptive son’s birth mother at a Mother’s Day picnic. A widow tends to her mother-in-law’s garden to ameliorate their shared grief.
In twenty-eight stories that draw blood while making you laugh, Alex Behr’s debut collection Planet Grim is a vivid, unsettling portrait of the gritty fringes of San Francisco and Portland, where complicated characters long for connection just out of reach. Behr is an idiosyncratic, unpredictable prose stylist with an edge and willingness to cut to the bone that makes her writing truly original.
Advance praise:
“Alex Behr’s imagination is wild, rigorous, and totally unique. I haven’t been able to decide if her stories are comedies intercut with horror or horror stories leavened by comedy, but when they’re this entertaining, who cares?” — Tom Bissell, author of Apostle: Travels Among the Tombs of the Twelve
“Alex Behr’s Planet Grim turned me inside out. No, really, these stories of eros and ids getting loose, inner contradictions and desires crashing into each other like marbles, brutal instances of violence up against a moment of tender beauty, the people and lovers and mothers and families in this book are carved from the guts of us. What sits dead center at this hybrid of self and other is, mercifully, an unbeaten heart.” — Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Book of Joan and The Small Backs of Children
“Alex Behr’s characters are conflicted, uncertain, and pained. What’s so compelling about her fiction is how she honors that conflictedness, explores the uncertainties, and examines the pain until it reveals itself as irreducibly human and therefore a kind of grace.” — Dan DeWeese, author of You Don’t Love This Man and Disorder
“In Alex Behr’s funny, poignant stories, the kids are sharp, fearless, and insatiable, the parents conflicted, lustful, and tough. The meaning of family and love is an epic game nobody can win or stop playing.” — Mary Rechner, author of the story collection Nine Simple Patterns for Complicated Women