Books

Why We Never Talk About Sugar

Get ready. These are not your mother’s bedtime stories.

Praise for Why We Never Talk About Sugar:

“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 Bad Feminist and An Untamed State

“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 In the House upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods

“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