Blurbs!

Going through the publication process with my first book is teaching me a lot. For example, when I sent the book out for blurbs, I discovered a brand new blend of excitement and mortal terror that I think only exists when you’re showing other people your book for the first time. I spent a harrowing month with my stomach in knots waiting for the verdict. Would they love it? Hate it? Would their impressions of it be so different from mine that I won’t even recognize the book they’re describing?

Well, I just got the blurbs back from the very first readers of Why We Never Talk About Sugar and not only do they all appear to be talking about the correct book, they had such kind and thoughtful things to say about it that I wouldn’t dare disagree with them! See for yourself:

In Why We Never Talk About Sugar, Aubrey Hirsch posits an uncertain world, offering us her characters at their most confused, frightened, obsessed. As protection against their troubles, these men and women cling often to science, and also to story—and if these two ways of seeing cannot always save them, then still they might provide some comfort, some necessary and sustaining faith, the mechanisms of what greatest mysteries might await us all, when all else is stripped away: an elusive god particle, perhaps, floating inscrutable and gorgeous in its tricky invisibility; or else these many different heartbeats, somehow made stronger by each other’s presence, even amidst such finely-written heartbreak.

—Matt Bell, author of Cataclysm Baby

Why we could never talk enough about Aubrey Hirsch: there’s simply too much to say. Hirsch is a bright shining star of a writer and the stories in her flawless debut collection, Why We Never Talk About Sugar, are a little disturbing and a little strange and a little sweet but always a lot to hold on to. In stories like, “Certainty,” where a woman is convinced she will get her lover pregnant, Hirsch shows us how to believe in quiet magic. In the title story, Hirsch shows us the charm of her imagination and how carefully she will break your heart. Why We Never Talk About Sugar is a book you’ll keep coming back to, the one you won’t be able to stop talking about because it’s that damn good.

—Roxane Gay, author of Ayiti

Aubrey Hirsch knows that science isn’t theoretical or cold—it’s hot, magical, and deeply human. Each story in Why We Never Talk About Sugar is a Petri dish, a distinct world in which a particle is discovered, a lake vanishes, but the narrative microscope never forgets that what really matters are the characters. This fiction is lyrical and wicked smart, reminiscent of Aimee Bender and Miranda July. So, here’s my hypothesis: Aubrey Hirsch is a bright new voice in American fiction.

—Cathy Day, author of The Circus in Winter