KELLY LUCE is the author of the short-story collection Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail, which won Foreword Reviews's 2013 Editor's Choice Prize for Fiction. A native of Illinois, she holds a degree in cognitive science from Northwestern University and an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin. She is a fellow at Harvard's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and a contributing editor for Electric Literature. She lives in California's Santa Cruz Mountains.
"The writing of Kelly Luce is beautifully stark and simple, and at
the same time playful, earthy, and violent. She's unique, a natural
born writer, and Pull Me Under is a strange and very appealing
novel, a journey to Japan and the primal scene of the main
character's self--which, like a volcano, may have already blown its
top." --Rachel Kushner "Kelly Luce's unforgettable debut is an
elegant mystery, a tender story of family and forgiveness, an
unsettling depiction of the darkness we each carry inside, and a
hymn to Japan. Noodle shops, summer festivals, ancient temples, and
the lush landscape of rural Shikoku burst to life in these pages.
From its first sentence, Pull Me Under grabs the reader and doesn't
let go." --Sarah Bird, author of Above the East China Sea "As Rio
moves deeper into the painful secrets of the past, secrets that
nearly destroyed her in childhood and are threatening to undo her
once again, I could not stop turning the pages of Kelly Luce's
hypnotic debut. Pull Me Under is a fierce and suspenseful
exploration of the profoundly mysterious nature of identity,
written with precise and spectacular beauty. Kelly Luce is one of
our most thrilling new talents." --Laura van den Berg "Kelly Luce's
debut novel is an urgent and wise story about the many disparate
identities a life can hold, but it is also an astonishing example
of all that a novel can encompass. By turns, Pull Me Under is a
finely crafted mystery, a portrait of a fractured family, an
evocative travelogue, an aching coming-of-age tale, and an
insightful contemplation of our inescapable histories in an
increasingly globalized and digitized culture. In this novel, Luce
offers many poignant, page-turning pleasures, but her greatest gift
to the reader is her revelation of how a single life, a single
mind, a single, artful book can contain multitudes." --Stefan
Merrill Block "This is a suspense novel with a female protagonist
that gets more right about women than so many others I've read in
the past few years." --NPR "Revelatory" --Elle "[Pull Me Under]
will bewitch you." --O Magazine "Beautifully written and utterly
hypnotic, Pull Me Under is one you can't miss." Melissa Ragsdale,
Bustle "Propulsive and fresh . . . Luce knows how to end her story,
and does so satisfyingly." Trine Tsouderos, The Chicago Tribune
"Kelly Luce has written a phenomenal novel in Pull Me Under, one
that captivates and disquiets in its search for answers about the
parts of ourselves that are unknowable . . . Luce maneuvers the
reader through this story seamlessly, and, seeing as it's Halloween
season and all, I'll say, too: she is a virtuosic jack-o-lantern
carver, slicing and hewing away at her characters until their pulpy
interiors are exposed. And from inside that space, she shines a
light." --Vincent Scarpa, Electric Literature "Pull Me Under, which
follows Luce's award-winning short-story collection, is
psychologically complex; it inspires horror, sympathy and even, at
times, humor. Amid all the gray, however, one thing is certain:
Luce is worth watching." --Suzanne Kamata, The Japan Times "Luce's
prose is sharp and powerful, rising to heights when conjuring a
sense of nostalgia and homecoming for places that readers have
likely never been. The Japan of Pull Me Under does not read as a
caricature of the country, but rather a genuine experience that at
times is both atmospheric and nearly tangible . . . Pull Me Under
does so much so well." --BookPeople "Kelly Luce's stories render
memorably and with deadpan understatement their protagonists'
obsessive combinations of longing and grief and bafflement in the
face of their loved ones' emotional requirements, even as their
worlds slip seamlessly into the uncanny. These stories unsettle as
much as they entertain." --Jim Shepard "Kelly Luce writes stories
whose charm is a lasting effect. Her work is witty, unpredictable,
and freshly written. There's a genuine imagination at work here
that is a delight to spend time with." --Stuart Dybek "In Three
Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail, Kelly Luce manages the
impossible: each story delicate and enormous, intricate,
glitteringly beautiful, never less than strange, never less than
profound, ten spiderwebs astonishingly spun. Readers: here is your
new favorite short story writer." --Elizabeth McCracken "Luce
deftly evokes Japan without exoticizing it . . . The final act is
the novel's strongest and most confident, weaving the book's
threads together and leaving a lasting reverberation." --Publishers
Weekly "Luce's debut novel is psychologically seductive, and the
prose draws the reader into its loneliness. Pull Me Under shines
brightest as an inquest into whether a split psyche can ever be
made whole once the past becomes its own foreign country-and the
tyranny of being taught that a dark past is not to be trespassed
upon." -Amy Jo Burns, Ploughshares ("The Most Necessary Books for
the End of 2016") "Luce follows her hit story collection, Three
Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail, with a debut novel
about secret lives and selfhood . . . Understated yet emotionally
gripping, Luce's novel is an intimate portrayal of one woman's
search for identity."
--Jonathan Fullmer, Booklist "I was sucked into the prose and
character in Luce's latest accomplishment from the very start. Rio
Silvestri and Chizuru Akitani bring both the familiar and the
terrifying parts of our psyche to the surface and then pull you
right back down into the depths of this stunning debut novel."
-Nick Buzanski, Book Culture
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