Miracles Come on Mondays, Paperback

"What is the shape of progress inside a subpar environment, when escape is not possible, and life must be measured as the relative extremity of multiple misfortunes? Is it the shape of a bird?" Miracles Come on Mondays begins with a voice--stark, chilling, totally captivating--that searches a barren landscape for a single receptive ear. With echoes of Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, and Lydia Davis, Penelope Cray creates dark and sometimes darkly funny scenes that most resemble the works of Kafka. Cray's characters strain against the indifference of everyday life until, too tired to yearn anymore, they begin the systematic work of making their worlds mentally and spiritually tolerable. And yet, somehow, there's joy. This book asks us to let go of our ideas of sense and replace them with something better, something that somehow makes more sense than sense. Cray has written a debut work of fiction that feels entirely new and deeply true.

Born in Australia, Penelope Cray was naturalized as a U.S. citizen on September 11, 2018. Her poems and short fiction have appeared in journals such as Harvard Review, New England Review, Bartleby Snopes, elimae, Pleiades, and American Letters & Commentary and in the anthology Please Do Not Remove. She holds an MFA from the New School and has been a fellow at the Vermont Studio Center. She lives with her family in northern Vermont, where she runs an editorial business.