First Body

Two nurses with scissors could make a man naked in eleven seconds.” The first sentence of the first story from this collection grabs you and offers an insightful metaphor for all that is to come. With dark and seductive prose, Thon strips away the surface of her characters to get to the raw heart of being. Her characters’ lives are edged with pain, addiction, loneliness, and dire circumstances. Sex is an act of survival, drugs less a matter of choice than necessity, human contact less an act of intimacy than a jostling for position. And Thon dumps you right into the middle of these desperate lives, graced only with her lyrical and searching voice. Although it’s a slender collection, barely more than 150 pages, it hits you hard–you’ll want to catch your breath after each story. Granta has declared Thon to be among the best young American novelists, and this collection does not belie the accolades.