Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead, Chanelle Benz

A stunningly original debut collection, The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead is about lives across history marked by violence and longing. In ten stories of impressive range, Chanelle Benz displays a staggering command of craft as she crisscrosses through time and space to create a complex mosaic of humanity. In “The Diplomat’s Daughter,” a woman disappears and resurfaces across the world as a deadly force of nature with many names. “West of the Known” tells of a brother and sister who turn outlaw in a wild and brutal landscape. “James III” lays bare the struggle of a young Philadelphia boy who must contend with the contradictions of privilege, violence, and the sway of an incarcerated father.

In “That We May Be All One Sheepefolde,” a sixteenth-century English monk suffers the dissolution of his monastery and the loss of all that he held sacred. The characters in Benz’s wildly imaginative collection are as varied as any in recent literature, subverting boundaries of race, gender, and class, but they share a t.