Contact me for a signed copy of any of these books!

Available from Gold Wake Press: The Neighborhood! This collection of short stories has fanged mermaids, pet wolves, philandering Little Red Riding Hoods, and more…order now from Gold Wake Press, Amazon, and Barnes and Noble.

New: A Thai translation of With Animal! Even if you don’t read Thai, this book is worth it for the gorgeous artwork.

From Red Bird Chapbooks, A Guide to Strange Places! This collection of short stories imagines what it would be like if settings had their own points of view.

From Noctuary Press, The Reckless Remainder, prose poetry co-written with Carol Guess.

 

From Black Lawrence Press, With Animal, a collection of short stories that imagine people pregnant with various animals. Hybrid twins: one human, one horse. A man pregnant with a kangaroo, a woman raising a baby dragon. A twenty-first century Virgin Mary reimagined as a queer single mother giving birth in a petting zoo. A collaborative short story collection written with Carol Guess.

Order from: Black Lawrence Press,  Small Press Distribution,  Amazon

PRAISE

• “Enter into the unexpected—human progeny not as Homo sapiens but as a dragon, a school of fish, a foal, a clutch of rattlesnakes, a spider. The mothers wrestle with the surprise births of furred, finned and winged offspring, and then worry: how will my baby fit in at school? what happens when she literally leaves the nest? Part parenting manual, part cautionary tale, Guess and Magee provide a smorgasbord of genetic tales and travails. Each piece takes you into startling worlds of brilliant imaginations set loose.”
  —Sara Greenslit, DVM, author of As If a Bird Flew By Me
• “Wondrous and wonderful; a virtual feast of imagination, humor, and heart. The rare example of a short story collection that grows and builds upon itself til it becomes a ladder to something somewhere else.”
  —Ben Loory, author of Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day
• “In allusive and poetic prose, Carol Guess and Kelly Magee take their readers into a world where human parents give birth to animal babies. Yet the underlying concern of With Animal is wholly human: how do we come to love, and how do we know when to hold on to it or let it go? These crystalline narratives explore ideas of instinct, caregiving, desire, and need, boldly facing the darkest secrets of parenthood as well as the greatest joys—and unearthing the complex moment when the two meet.”
  —Kristiana Kahakauwila, author of This is Paradise

From the University of North Texas Press, Body Language, winner of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction.

 

Read an excerpt here.

Buy it at UNT Press, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Powell’s. Buy an audio version at Audible.

“These visionary stories bring us an America that is as phantasmagoric as a Bosch painting come to life, yet as real as the daily news; a land of mega churches, tilt-a-whirls, thoughtful muggers, low-income apartment buildings, runaways, lost cities, obese suicidal hikers, drag contests, tornados . . . a land both fragile and tough, heartbroken, and resiliently hopeful. In short, this is an amazing, urgent, vital book, and Kelly Magee is an exciting new literary talent.” –Dan Chaon, judge

“Kelly Magee is a damn fine writer.” — Dorothy Allison

“Kelly Magee’s entirely beguiling, slightly subterranean, dangerously familiar characters are barely keeping their heads above water when outside forces conspire to upend them for good: a carnival, a tornado, the return of a lover, the end of the world.It is under these pressures that her characters become wholly memorable (and her language dazzling), in this finely crafted, uniquely lyrical, surprising debut.” –Pam Houston

“Kelly Magee is just the writer we need for this new century–plain-talking, clear-minded, big-hearted, a writer unafraid of the hard truths rising up in the hinterlands to bedevil us, a writer as crafty as she is compassionate, a writer resolute in the face of the wishy-washy and the cowardly, a writer keen to understand our kind by throwing story at us, a writer eager to poke a hole in dreamland. Ms. Magee is our newest soothsayer.” –Lee K. Abbott

“Watch out! Kelly Magee is about to capture your imagination and intellect and heart with her stunning new collection. Body Language reveals a fresh, versatile talent as Magee’s idiosyncratically real characters travel this rich, contradictory country. The eleven stories are by turns smart, sensual, witty, compassionate, energetic and nimble. This debut collection will wake you up, provoke laughter and tears, and make you grateful to be human.” –Valerie Miner, author of Abundant Light and The Low Road

“Kelly Magee writes like an angel, but she’s got the devil in her. Who’d expect to empathize with a couple of punks mugging people at an ATM machine? In Magee’s world, a father teaches his daughters how to jump off a roof, a drag queen and a lesbian sleep together and love each other, a girl plunges her hand into her lover’s fish tank and draws out a gold fish, feels “the motor buzzing in her hand.” Magee holds her readers in the palm of her hand: she has all the power in the world over us.” –Michelle Herman, author of Dog

From Jellyfish Highway Press, Your Sick, a collection of short stories that center around characters sick with imaginary illnesses, co-written with Carol Guess and Elizabeth Colen.

From dancing girl press, History of My Locked Wrist, a chapbook of prose poems written with Kristina Marie Darling and Carol Guess.