A bold, dazzling debut collection about girls and women in a world where sexuality and self-delusion collide. A teacher obsesses over a student who comes to class with scratch marks on his face; a Catholic girl graduating from high school finds a warped kind of redemption in her school’s contrived class rituals; a woman looking to rent a house is sucked into a strangely inappropriate correspondence with her landlord—these are just a few of the powerful plotlines in Suzanne Rivecca’s gorgeously wrought debut collection. From a college student who adopts a false hippie persona to find love to a young memoirist who bumps up against a sexually obsessed fan, the characters in these fiercely original tales grapple with what it means to be honest with themselves and the world. Suzanne Rivecca’s fiction has appeared in Best New American Voices 2009, among other publications. A winner of the Pushcart Prize and a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, she lives in San Francisco.