Baby is a Thing Best Whispered – Flash Fiction

“In Baby is a Thing Best Whispered, Keely O’Shaughnessy brilliantly charts adolescence, trauma, the causal links between actions and generations, motherhood, and mending parental wounds, all with sublime wordcraft and control. Reframing adverse experiences with fabulism, the ethereal and painfully true, this book finds nostalgia without the rose tint, and its thematic arc builds to a masterful crescendo. This is a book I will never forget.”

– Liza Olson, author of Here’s Waldo, The Brother We Share, and Afterglow, EIC of (mac)ro(mic)

“There’s something circular and satisfying about Keely O’Shaughnessy’s debut collection Baby is a Thing Best Whispered – a body of literary work about the body, a body, bodies. In twenty-two tiny stories, O’Shaughnessy whispers and shouts and muses about spider crabs, flotation therapy, the cinema, cookies, biology, teeth, sinners, manicures, mazes, plants and – babies. The language and descriptions are rich and lyrical in these memorable flashes as her writer’s voice draws the reader in close with whispers and truths about linked lives, from baby to adulthood.”

-Amy Cipolla Barnes, author of Mother Figures, and Ambrotypes

“The words in Keely O’Shaughnessy’s debut flash fiction collection, Baby is a Thing Best Whispered, shoot off the page, sharp and painful, like a poisoned cupid’s arrow, aimed straight at the heart, where they cut short, but deep, and linger like an open wound. This collection, in its startling beauty and shimmering precision, explores loss and leaving, love and lust, all within the remit of complicated and intimate relationships. An absolute must-read.”

-Laura Besley, author of The Almost Mothers, 100neHundred and (Un)Natural Elements

Amazon.com

by