Hunger Moon: (Nunatak First Fiction)

Finalist for the Seventh Annual Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize in the Literary Fiction category Includes author-curated discussion questions! Traci Skuce's Hunger Moon is a collection of stories that echo with the yearning to be replenished, to be made full. Here are characters at cusp-points in their lives, attempting to shift their trajectories: to cease wrapping up their heart's desire in a pink bubble by launching it into the universe. Some turn to ESP, some to a belief in ghosts, some to the future caught inside a glass bottle, each character taking the hackneyed adage "Follow Your Bliss" too literally to blissfully follow their own storyline. Emotional charged, evocative, and lush, Hunger Moon's thirteen short stories each set out on profound quests to satisfy an emotional hunger.

About the Author :
Traci Skuce graduated from the Pacific University low-residency MFA program in 2015. Her short stories and non-fiction have appeared in several publications across North America including Grain, New Ohio Review, The New Quarterly, and Prairie Fire, and have been nominated for four Pushcart Prizes and two Journey prizes. For the past twenty years, Traci has lived in Cumberland, BC with her husband and two sons.

Review :
Praise for Hunger Moon: "Many of the stories are rather open-ended and leave the reader with the sense that the resolution and living out of these lives is not fated, but choices to be made in the future. But there is a forceful emptiness and uncertainty that brings the lives of these mostly separate characters and stories together.... I would gladly read [Hunger Moon] again, preferably in hard copy, and recommend [this collection] in terms of language, story, and character, and [its] engagements with larger questions of life and meaning." ~ Shoshannah Ganz, Canadian Literature "Skuce has an obvious ease with language, and she writes with confidence.... reading these stories, it's easy to see why they found favour with the editors of literary journals in Canada and the U.S." ~Heather Graham, The Ormsby Review "The artful writing and the complexity of the emotional landscape heighten the appeal and significance of each story." ~ Marjorie Anderson, Winnipeg Free Press "I could go on listing more of Skuce's amazing storytelling techniques in Hunger Moon, but honestly, I think you should just read it for yourself. The collection has great stories and is a great read overall." ~ Skylar Kay, FreeFall Magazine "Traci Skuce's impressive debut collection, Hunger Moon, places her in the ranks of those short fiction writers whose work I embrace and celebrate. Sentence by sentence these thirteen stories introduce a voice as original and assured as the tales she tells. Poignant, beautifully crafted and deeply imagined, this is storytelling at its best." ~ Jack Driscoll, author of The Goat Fish and the Lover's Knot "Re-imagine the lives of girls and women. Feel again our fear of a violent child who stalks us, of our mindless abandonment to bodily sensation which may or may not blight the rest of our lives. Remember also when our fierce loyalties were betrayed. Witness these lives depicted like a slo-mo train wreck which cannot sever our need to depend on someone, even if that someone turns out to be our own selves." ~ Caroline Woodward, author of Light Years: Memoir of a Modern Lighthouse Keeper "All senses are fully engaged in Hunger Moon, an honest, unflinching and riveting collection. The characters within these well-crafted stories, whether children, twenty-somethings or young parents, are struggling, like most of us, to navigate the tricky, unreliable territories of familial and romantic love. Read these stories and be transported back to the age before internet, to tree planting camps and lakeside holidays, to relentless heat and longing in both near and distant corners of the world, as characters wrestle with transitions and loss and come to a deeper understanding of what it is to be human." ~ Julie Paul, author of Meteorites and The Pull of the Moon