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Refrigerated Music for a Gleaming Woman: Stories
Winner of the FC2 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize Named One of the Best Books of 2017 by The Brooklyn Rail
A darkly comical horror lurks beneath the surface of everyday events in Refrigerated Music for a Gleaming Woman , a seductively poetic story collection of unusual brilliance and rare humor.
In Aimee Parkison's Refrigerated Music for a Gleaming Woman , lovers find unexpected romance in cramped spaces, fast food addicts struggle through cheeseburger addiction, and the splendor of nature competes with the violence of television. All the while, a complicated and precarious present dawns onto a new world where wealthy women wear children's eyes as jewelry and those in need of money hawk their faces only to forever mourn what parts of themselves they have sold to survive.
Open the refrigerator door. Inside are antique jars. Open them to hear the Beethoven playing piano; slaves singing for freedom in plantation fields; mothers humming lullabies through the night to smallpox babies, knowing this song is the last sound their children will ever hear.
As Stephen Graham Jones notes in his foreword to this prize-winning collection, "The best books . . . fold you into a darkness sparkling with life. They lock you in the refrigerator but they also pipe in some music that never repeats, and when the door starts to open, you cling tight to it, so you can have just a few minutes more. This book, it'll be over far too fast for you, yes. But even were it five times as thick as it is now, it would still be too short. Remember, though, the best books, they're loops. They never stop. This one still hasn't, for me."
A darkly comical horror lurks beneath the surface of everyday events in Refrigerated Music for a Gleaming Woman , a seductively poetic story collection of unusual brilliance and rare humor.
In Aimee Parkison's Refrigerated Music for a Gleaming Woman , lovers find unexpected romance in cramped spaces, fast food addicts struggle through cheeseburger addiction, and the splendor of nature competes with the violence of television. All the while, a complicated and precarious present dawns onto a new world where wealthy women wear children's eyes as jewelry and those in need of money hawk their faces only to forever mourn what parts of themselves they have sold to survive.
Open the refrigerator door. Inside are antique jars. Open them to hear the Beethoven playing piano; slaves singing for freedom in plantation fields; mothers humming lullabies through the night to smallpox babies, knowing this song is the last sound their children will ever hear.
As Stephen Graham Jones notes in his foreword to this prize-winning collection, "The best books . . . fold you into a darkness sparkling with life. They lock you in the refrigerator but they also pipe in some music that never repeats, and when the door starts to open, you cling tight to it, so you can have just a few minutes more. This book, it'll be over far too fast for you, yes. But even were it five times as thick as it is now, it would still be too short. Remember, though, the best books, they're loops. They never stop. This one still hasn't, for me."
- GenresShort Stories
96 pages, Paperback
Published March 7, 2017
About the author
Aimee Parkison
12 books34 followersAimee Parkison is an American author of short stories, experimental fiction, flash fiction, and short novels. Her fiction has won numerous awards and fellowships, including a Christopher Isherwood Fellowship, the Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize from Fiction Collective Two, the Kurt Vonnegut Prize from North American Review, the Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction, the Jack Dyer Prize from Crab Orchard Review, a North Carolina Arts Council Fellowship, a Writers at Work Fellowship, a Puffin Foundation Fellowship, and an American Antiquarian Society Creative Artists Fellowship.
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
April 7, 2017
I read "Refrigerated Music for a Gleaming Woman: Stories" from back to front. It changed things, and for the better - or, at least, cleared a few things up.
Reading from beginning to end one is left feeling uneasy by Parkison's prose, once again, with the sadistic and sad curveballs that are introduced at such correct times so as to make the story all the more impactful. It reads like a collection of episodes that whether there's a tinge of hope or not, things don't end with a swelling musical note and an, "aww".
Switch this to from back cover to front cover and the experience is stranger. This is a book of moments in some forsaken landscape flooding and flooded with drowning lives that are being displaced both mentally and physically. The titles to the stories lend something to this groundbreaking reading, titles such as, "Driftwood Sisters", "Snow in Thunder", "On Flooded Roads", "The Nomad", and "The Lost Sea".
1 star docked for no reason greater than some comments written about my local people of my gender meeting with some rather swift words from the author, tisk tisk.
Reading from beginning to end one is left feeling uneasy by Parkison's prose, once again, with the sadistic and sad curveballs that are introduced at such correct times so as to make the story all the more impactful. It reads like a collection of episodes that whether there's a tinge of hope or not, things don't end with a swelling musical note and an, "aww".
Switch this to from back cover to front cover and the experience is stranger. This is a book of moments in some forsaken landscape flooding and flooded with drowning lives that are being displaced both mentally and physically. The titles to the stories lend something to this groundbreaking reading, titles such as, "Driftwood Sisters", "Snow in Thunder", "On Flooded Roads", "The Nomad", and "The Lost Sea".
1 star docked for no reason greater than some comments written about my local people of my gender meeting with some rather swift words from the author, tisk tisk.
May 30, 2017
Mostly short pieces, that I chewed over and enjoyed. The last story "Scrutinize" seems to be a significant departure; a horrific little fable of how technology and privilege feed on each other, that hits a bit close to home today.
April 4, 2017
To call this book beautiful would be doing it a disservice. Not because it’s not beautiful, not because there are not lines of such lyric gorgeousness they take your breath away—there are, loads of them—but because beauty, in this day and age, is often used to describe something somewhat fragile or meek. Something that can be pinned down and contained. Beauty is not usually associated with something that has power and bite and ruthless strength. With something bladelike and sharp as nails, something that can slice apart a body, a sense of self, a whole damn culture—you, as you read. And that is something this book has in spades. So I’m not going to call this book beautiful, though I will say that the sheer elegance of many of its passages, juxtaposed next to moments of terror, of sorrow, and of pure comedic and satirical wit, combine to create one of the most intense, uneasy, and yet bewitching sensations I’ve experienced in reading a book in a long time, maybe ever. I put it down, picked it right back up, and read it again.
March 6, 2018
So many sentences leave you breathless. This is a collection you simply have to read!
Here is an excerpt from "On Flooded Roads," 'Death is a message. It has meaning. This is how I've come to understand it, when I think of the killings, and the way that some women and girls are taken.' This book is hilarious, tragic, and arresting and so much more.
Here is an excerpt from "On Flooded Roads," 'Death is a message. It has meaning. This is how I've come to understand it, when I think of the killings, and the way that some women and girls are taken.' This book is hilarious, tragic, and arresting and so much more.
March 19, 2017
Refrigerated Music for a Gleaming Woman was just released this month (March 2017) by FC2, where it won the Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize, judged by the amazing Stephen Graham Jones. Here is what Stephen said in his foreword to the collection of experimental stories and flash fictions: “The best books . . . fold you into a darkness sparkling with life. They lock you in the refrigerator but they also pipe in some music that never repeats, and when the door starts to open, you cling tight to it, so you can have just a few minutes more. This book, it’ll be over far too fast for you, yes. But even were it five times as thick as it is now, it would still be too short. Remember, though, the best books, they’re loops. They never stop. This one still hasn’t, for me.”
Kirkus Reviews said this: "Parkison makes absurd that which is commonplace by twisting it into abnormality. Lyrical and often abstract, these seemingly linked stories call attention to the grotesque in modern society. . . . Although both the message and the writing are sometimes heavy-handed, it is effective. One is moved equally by the lyricism and repulsiveness and can find beauty in both. A poetic and purposefully perverse collection of stories that describes a dystopian world only slightly divergent from our own."
The book also got early reviews from the brilliant Jane McCafferty and the astonishing Mary Cappello. Here's what they had to say--
"Aimee Parkison is a shrewd, fiery, wildly poetic, politically astute writer of fiction. With Refrigerated Music for a Gleaming Woman, Parkison gifts us with deeply imagined, and often fantastic landscapes, straight from the heart of her unique imagination, but these are always, in part, sharp commentaries on the world we have to inhabit in our daily lives. Parkison’s satirical embrace, and always beautiful language, leaves you more awake to the world and unsettled in all the right ways."
—Jane McCafferty, author of One Heart and First You Try Everything
"In Aimee Parkison’s ingenious collection, words and images ricochet off the walls of the page, defying logic and gravity to expose reality’s invisible footing. A kind of feminist Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, Parkison’s reinvented fables, ghost tales, and murder mysteries demonstrate how absurdist extremes clear a space for the most potent polemic. Only by turning the world on its head can we see it aright: here are recognitions, simultaneously hilarious and grave."
—Mary Cappello, author of Life Breaks In: A Mood Almanack
The book is a short story collection with numerous flash fictions and several longer fictions. The stories in the collection were originally published by North American Review, the Collagist, Fiction International, Atticus Review, Santa Fe Literary Review, the Laurel Review, Lake Effect, Denver Quarterly, and the anthology PP/FF.
Kirkus Reviews said this: "Parkison makes absurd that which is commonplace by twisting it into abnormality. Lyrical and often abstract, these seemingly linked stories call attention to the grotesque in modern society. . . . Although both the message and the writing are sometimes heavy-handed, it is effective. One is moved equally by the lyricism and repulsiveness and can find beauty in both. A poetic and purposefully perverse collection of stories that describes a dystopian world only slightly divergent from our own."
The book also got early reviews from the brilliant Jane McCafferty and the astonishing Mary Cappello. Here's what they had to say--
"Aimee Parkison is a shrewd, fiery, wildly poetic, politically astute writer of fiction. With Refrigerated Music for a Gleaming Woman, Parkison gifts us with deeply imagined, and often fantastic landscapes, straight from the heart of her unique imagination, but these are always, in part, sharp commentaries on the world we have to inhabit in our daily lives. Parkison’s satirical embrace, and always beautiful language, leaves you more awake to the world and unsettled in all the right ways."
—Jane McCafferty, author of One Heart and First You Try Everything
"In Aimee Parkison’s ingenious collection, words and images ricochet off the walls of the page, defying logic and gravity to expose reality’s invisible footing. A kind of feminist Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, Parkison’s reinvented fables, ghost tales, and murder mysteries demonstrate how absurdist extremes clear a space for the most potent polemic. Only by turning the world on its head can we see it aright: here are recognitions, simultaneously hilarious and grave."
—Mary Cappello, author of Life Breaks In: A Mood Almanack
The book is a short story collection with numerous flash fictions and several longer fictions. The stories in the collection were originally published by North American Review, the Collagist, Fiction International, Atticus Review, Santa Fe Literary Review, the Laurel Review, Lake Effect, Denver Quarterly, and the anthology PP/FF.
January 8, 2022
I'm not always good about reading a books foreword, but when it's written by Stephen Graham Jones I end randomly buying it just for his name lol. In this case, I wish I could personally thank him because this book and Aimee Parkison are amazing.
This is how Stephen Graham Jones introduced me to Aimee:
"The best fiction ruins other fiction for you, for a while. This fiction you're holding - apologies in advance, but, for a couple weeks here, everything you read is going to come off as maybe a bit flat? Maybe a bit hollow? Maybe not as sincere as you were wanting it to be?
It definitely won't be as shot through with hilarity as Refrigerated Music for a Gleaming Woman. If the book's even comedic at all, I mean. I'm not sure that it is. Could be that it's just honest. In which case, it's actually terrifying, and I'm thankful it comes in such small bites. All the same, reading this, you do grin. But a grin doesn't always mean something funny happened, does it? You grin grinding up the backside of a rollercoaster. You grin right before the plunge. You grin so you won't scream, and then you probably scream anyway."
He was right in every way about these short stories. It's been two days since I've finished this book and I'm still thinking about it. Still going back and re-reading certain stories. Still reveling in the darkness and elegant writing that's hidden in this tiny book. I bought my copy of this book from a used book store and didn't realize it was filled with notes from someone else's adventure until I got home; but on the last page was written in beautiful cursive ink the word, mythic, which I thinks sums up this book pretty well. It was fucking mythic and a hell of a ride.
This is how Stephen Graham Jones introduced me to Aimee:
"The best fiction ruins other fiction for you, for a while. This fiction you're holding - apologies in advance, but, for a couple weeks here, everything you read is going to come off as maybe a bit flat? Maybe a bit hollow? Maybe not as sincere as you were wanting it to be?
It definitely won't be as shot through with hilarity as Refrigerated Music for a Gleaming Woman. If the book's even comedic at all, I mean. I'm not sure that it is. Could be that it's just honest. In which case, it's actually terrifying, and I'm thankful it comes in such small bites. All the same, reading this, you do grin. But a grin doesn't always mean something funny happened, does it? You grin grinding up the backside of a rollercoaster. You grin right before the plunge. You grin so you won't scream, and then you probably scream anyway."
He was right in every way about these short stories. It's been two days since I've finished this book and I'm still thinking about it. Still going back and re-reading certain stories. Still reveling in the darkness and elegant writing that's hidden in this tiny book. I bought my copy of this book from a used book store and didn't realize it was filled with notes from someone else's adventure until I got home; but on the last page was written in beautiful cursive ink the word, mythic, which I thinks sums up this book pretty well. It was fucking mythic and a hell of a ride.
May 7, 2018
Extremely odd book—often feels more like prose poems than stories. Some are interconnected in obscure (or not so obscure) ways. They tend to be at their best when they are longer ("Scrutinize" and "On Flooded Roads" were perhaps the two best stories in the collection). I expect the shorter, more poetic stories are more rewarding upon rereading (their language is beautiful if difficult to nail down).
May 24, 2023
The writing is phenomenal, but the shorter stories come across as poetry rather than prose. That's not a bad thing at all, they just leave a lot to be desired and (to be honest) left me searching for meaning.
Her "longer" stories were knockouts, especially "Scrutinize"- what a sucker punch. I'm in awe. It's brilliant and worth the entire collection for just this one. LOVED IT.
Her "longer" stories were knockouts, especially "Scrutinize"- what a sucker punch. I'm in awe. It's brilliant and worth the entire collection for just this one. LOVED IT.
August 2, 2017
Maybe these stories are too short. I loved some of the sentences, but never any of the stories as a whole.
April 20, 2018
I guess I can admire the attempt, but ultimately I found this work to be derivative and a waste of my time. Her prose leaves a lot to be desired. I would not recommend this book.
November 25, 2020
Absolutely unique! A wild ride. LOVE!
January 27, 2021
Fabulous, surprising stories that shine! A great read.
February 22, 2024
i don’t get the hype at all. idk maybe it’s me
good title tho. rocked that shit
good title tho. rocked that shit
March 9, 2024
The longer speculative stories stand out but the rest sorta floats by like dandelion fluff
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews