Phantom Advances

"Mary Lynn Reed’s Phantom Advances makes me yearn for the beginning stages of a terrible crush. There is so much desire in this collection—the need to be seen, touched—though her characters are most often watching, biding their time. And isn’t this the best part? I absolutely love these stories."

—Mary Miller, author of Biloxi and Always Happy Hour

"There is so much to love about this book, but it’s Reed’s abiding interest in the slipperiness of identity, the fluid and haphazard dynamics of love and desire, and the way she heads, always, in the direction of generative and electrifying mystery that sets this singular collection apart."

—Maud Casey, author of City of Incurable Women

"Mary Lynn Reed's stories don't begin so much as erupt. Phantom Advances happens everywhere in America, in corner bowling alleys and barber shops and off the grid motels everyone else forgot to notice. But there it is, the truth of all of us, hiding in plain sight, hiding in the journals in Reed's eye."

—Barrett Warner, author of Why Is It So Hard to Kill You?

"The protagonists in Phantom Advances are often vulnerable and confused, but they're sturdy enough to know that life is not an equation and "identity" doesn't always solve for X. Mary Lynn Reed's psychologically acute stories celebrate the beauty and anguish of not knowing all the answers."

—Pamela Erens, author of The Virgins

In Mary Lynn Reed’s debut short story collection, Phantom Advances, young queer women travel America’s back roads, roaming through the South, Midwest, New York, and California, while questions of gender and identity ride shotgun. Peering through bug-stained windshields and the viewfinders of old film cameras, these wanderers find love, heartbreak, and little pieces of themselves wherever the road takes them. Along the way, their origin stories are also revealed. Boyish girls ace math while mucking horse stalls at a nudist summer camp and teenage tomboys pool-shark at the family-owned Game Room. In bowling alleys, factories, college-town bars, and gay discos, the stories in Phantom Advances calculate the risks of love, and contemplate the odds of being seen for who you truly are.