Call it happily ever after or a perfect life, it’s a universal destination we all hope to reach. Lily plays out the anxieties of her freshman year while standing in line. Lin, wanting only to be left alone, watches a stranger waiting on her porch. Denny flies tourists around an Alaska mountain, hoping to forget, while Alice embarks on an adventure to remember. Tate and Emily, friends since childhood, team up to play out the pirate games of their youth, only this time it’s not a game. From North America’s highest mountain to that quirky town at the end of the hook of Cape Cod and well past the stars beyond, Burnes explores the hopes and fears that drive us all. With eight previously published stories, and the all new “Auto Repair,” A Perfect Life and Other Stories is the first collection by the author of Wishbone.
“A Perfect Life” — “A Certain Moon” — “Forget-Me-Not” — “Lily Gets a Flu Shot” — “The Game” — “The Gift” — “The Stranger” — “Tracy Arm” — “Auto Repair”
Rainbow Awards
Winner
2017 Best Lesbian Anthology/Collection
GusGus Press
178 pp. ● 4.5×7
$9.95 (pb) ● $4.95 (eb)
ISBN 978-1-943837-36-6 (pb)
FICTION – Short Stories
FICTION – Lesbian
Publication date: September 1, 2016
Elaine Burnes lives in western Massachusetts. After 20 years working and writing for a variety of environmental nonprofits, she tired of reality and turned to writing fiction in her spare time, publishing her first short story, “A Perfect Life,” in Skulls and Crossbones (Mindancer Press) in 2010. Since then, she’s had more stories published, including “A Certain Moon,” in the Golden Crown Literary Society Award–winning anthology Wicked Things from Ylva in 2014, and “Auto Repair,” which earned an honorable mention in the 2015 Saints and Sinners Short Fiction Contest. These are collected in A Perfect Life and Other Stories (GusGus Press, 2016), which won a Rainbow Award for Best Lesbian Anthology/Collection. Her first novel, Wishbone (Bedazzled Ink, 2015) received a 2016 Golden Crown Literary Society Award for Dramatic/General Fiction.
Q&A with Elaine Burnes – Women & Words