A Dream Between Two Rivers: Stories of Liminality

A Dream Between Two Rivers: Stories of Liminality is both literary and speculative, both magically real and viscerally strange in the tradition of Angela Carter, Karen Russell, and Jorge Luis Borges. In this collection, KL Pereira weaves elements of fairy tale, folklore, and myth into the lives of women, children, and immigrants. Her lucid prose underscores the tenacity of those who are most vulnerable, who live on edges between neat and clear definitions of who they are and who they want to be. Free of normative ideas of gender, class, race, and sexuality, Pereira explores rebirth amidst darkness.

"A DREAM BETWEEN TWO RIVERS is a precious gem all its own. Folks tales, experimental literature, speculative fiction, and mythology whether invented or neoclassical, all play together here gorgeously. The ghosts of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jose Donoso, Leonora Carrington, and Octavia Butler haunt this potent collection by an author of boundless imaginative gifts. Imagine a poet and painter in another dimension possessed by fever dreams and trying to tell our stories, and that will bring you only somewhere close to the magic of KL Pereira." --Porochista Khakpour, author of The Last Illusion and Sick

"Once this collection gripped me in its maw, it was impossible to put down and haunted my dreams for days after I was done reading. Each of Pereira's stories is stranger than the last and, through their explorations of identity, desire, and purpose, expose some deep truths about us as individuals. Lyrical, visceral, and tautA DREAM BETWEEN TWO RIVERS is a master work of a fever dream." --Lane Jacobson, Flyleaf Books (Chapel Hill, NC)

"KL Pereira's A DREAM BETWEEN TWO RIVERS is a wonderfully dark, evocative, mischievous collection. Pereira expertly reinvents familiar favorites and prods at the boundaries of genre with a unique, eloquent voice. With wit and compassion A DREAM BETWEEN TWO RIVERS unflinchingly explores what it means to be human." --Paul Tremblay, bestselling author of A Head Full of Ghosts and Disappearance at Devil's Rock

"KL Pereira's debut collection draws on myth, fairy tales, and her often twisted imagination to create short stories about the outcasts, the marginalized, and the ones who are determined to empower themselves. Written with fresh and feverish prose, many of the stories are brief, brutal, and woven with a dark magic--as unsettling as dreams you similtaneously want to end and continue." --Kelsey Westenberg, Roscoe Books (Chicago, Il)

"KL Pereira's writing is like a kaleidoscopic hallucination re-configuring in the blood: feverish, poetic, addictive. Highly recommended." --Irenosen Okojie, award-winning author of Speak Gigantular and Butterfly Fish

"Pereira's stories are unsettling like the figures that linger in your vision right after you've woken up making you think someone has entered the room while you were asleep, living in the space between what your brain knows to be true and what your bleary eyes are telling you in the moment. The world is often most sharply revealed by the stories that bend it, and Pereira's bent stories reveal a world of struggle and death as well as a world of connection and hope." --Josh Cook, Porter Square Books (Cambridge, MA)

"Take a soaring imagination, dazzling prose, and a merciless eye for truth, mix with an ability to explode our acceptable truth, and you'll have the stories of KL Pereira, a writer who spins tales that veer from velvet to etched in acid on glass and back again. Pereira's talent and poetry leap off the pages of A DREAM BETWEEN TWO RIVERS." --Randy Susan Meyers, international bestselling author of Widow of Wall Street and Accidents of Marriage

"In A DREAM BETWEEN TWO RIVERS, KL Pereira shows off her talents for short fiction. Each of these stories is like a dark jewel, glittering and sharp. Their sum is a lyrical meditation on the boundaries between dark and light from a tremendous up-and-coming talent." --Helen Marshall, Shirley Jackson Award-winning author of The Sex Lives of Monsters