Now, That’s a Trick by Dawn Sperber

The narrative voice in this collection brings to mind my favorite writers of stories—Denis Johnson, Lauren Groff, Eudora Welty. There’s a similar trust in the strangeness, danger, and lovability of humans and of language. At the same time, the voice here is distinctly Dawn Sperber’s own, magic and floating, yet rooted in our shared existence. As with the tricks performed by a character in the title story, the writing here seems to “spin and levitate in the air.” We’ll never know how she did it, but we’ll keep following her, hoping to find out.

–Joanna Penn Cooper, author of The Itinerant Girl’s Guide to Self-Hypnosis

These spritely, sparkly stories beckon the reader into a world where anything can happen. Everyday life is transformed—no,transmuted—into something unpredictable and a little risky, and the language leaps and dips, motored by passion, by humor, by fondness for these eccentric characters. These stories are dreamscapes tuned to the key of loss and redemption. I thoroughly enjoyed them.

–Summer Wood, author of Raising Wrecker and Arroyo

Sperber’s characters in Now, That’s a Trick are as bewitching as ever. I immediately fell in love with John in the opening title story; the chime of his pocket coins set the melody for chapbook. The short pieces that follow aren’t just small fictions, or poems, or songs, but a new slant on all three. Sperber somehow makes the reader feel as though they’re underwater, in the loveliest, most gentle way imaginable… It is the element of healing, lying just under the surface in this collection of eleven of Sperber’s finest pieces, that necessarily tempers the most dangerous edges of the loosening grip on reality.

–Vallie Lynn Watson, author of A River So Long