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Night Hands

Jen Cross's Night Hands is a dark fairy tale that echoes the narrative style popularized by the Brothers Grimm. Night Hands is an exploration of female agency in a dystopian patriarchy reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale where even just the sight of a woman's hands is a blasphemous, lewd crime. Like her mother before her and her sisters, Tüz prepares her husband's meals, nurtures the garden, sews their clothing, cans their preserves. All this she does while hiding her slender, delicate hands from sight by intricate veils on her dress sleeves protect the sight from the wandering eyes of boys and men—a woman's hands are only to be seen by her husband. Before she sleeps, her husband "unhands" her, removing her hands and rendering her helpless. Then one night she is jolted awake by a pair of phantom hands—hands that are strong, playful, erotic, and vindictive. They seem to have a mind of their own and Tüz  must decide whther to embrace their anarchy or dedicate herself to a life that no longer feels quite so perfect.

Read an excerpt here or buy at Amazzon, Kobo, or Weightless Books.

Jen Cross is a the author of Writing Ourselves Whole: Using the Power of Your Own Creativity to Recover and Heal from Sexual Trauma (Mango, 2017), which Eve Ensler called “a raw, powerful, necessary, wise and practiced guidebook to the revolutionary practice of finding the words, language and voice to transform suffering,” and the co- editor of Sex Still Spoken Here: An Erotic Reading Circle Anthology.  Her fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in over fifty anthologies and periodicals, including Nobody Passes, The Healing Art of Writing 2010, Under the Gum Tree, The Elephants, Sinister Wisdom, Visible: A Femmethology (Vol. 1), and Best Sex Writing 2008. Cross has facilitated sexuality and sexual trauma survivors writing workshops for over fifteen years, has worked with hundreds of writers, through private workshops and in collaboration with colleges, social change organizations, and other institutions in the San Francisco Bay Area and around the U.S. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University and an MA in Transformative Language Arts from Goddard College, and has been awarded residencies at Hedgebrook and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Art Center.

Working Titles Currently Available

Working Title 1.3: Tomorrow We Never Did Talk About It

a story by Eduardo Halfon, translated by Anne McLean

Working Title 1.4: Emergency Exit

a story by Carissa Halston

Working Title 1.5: Strange Mercies

a story by Pete Duval

Working Title 1.6: Just Another Jihadi Jane

a novel excerpt by Tabish Khair

Working Title 1.7: Ambrosia

a story by Lee Upton

Working Title 2.2: Time Served

an essay by J. Malcolm Garcia

Working Title 2.3: The Leader

a story by Nouri Zarrugh

Working Title 3.1: Table for One

A story by Yun Ko Eun, translated by Lizzie Buehler

On the Quay at Smyrna (Working Title 3.2)

a novella by Margot Demopoulos

The Tombs of Guy Debord

An Essay by Jean-Marie Apostolidès, translated by Laure Katsaros and Rene Kooiker

Night Hands

Jen Cross

AMOUR: Fields of Battle, Fields of Love

Véronique Tadjo, translated by Carolyn Shread

Silence Like Blood

Marie-Célie Agnant, translated by Dawn Fulton

CAPE COD, REVISITED

Michael Thurston

Bird Girl

Avital Balwit

Torture

Jean Améry, translated by Emory Klann

Roe: Telling the Tale

Joyce Avrech Berkman

Working Title 8.1: Coming Home

An Essay by Judith Filc

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