Unsaid Things
Short stories by Joanna Acevedo
Print: ISBN: 978-1-7364033-0-3
eBook: 978-1-7364033-1-0
“Everyone knows that love exists at the intersection of feasibility and desire.”
Unsaid Things takes the reader through the lives of thirteen people navigating the things that remain unsaid, such as “I love you” or “I hate you,” each in their own way and each with varying degrees of success. A woman who tells everyone her very much alive ex is dead. A model whose abuse as a girl defines how she sees her role in the world. An art student who is a curator, collecting beauty where she find it. A college student sinking deeper and deeper into a dark hole of drugs and sex. Always real, always unblinking, Joanna Acevedo pulls you along as a wing-woman on booze-soaked nights and ill-chosen hookups, all in search of more, the search for what remains unsaid.
Author Joanna Acevedo is a daring young voice in literary fiction. Unsaid Things is her second book. She is the author of the poetry collection The Pathophysiology of Longing (Black Centipede Press, 2020). Acevedo lives and works in New York City. She received her BA in Literary Studies from the New School in 2019. She is a Hospitalfield 2020 Interdisciplinary Resident, NYU Goldwater Fellow, Prose Editor at Inklette Magazine, and is currently an MFA Candidate at New York University. She currently teaches creative writing and is working on her debut novel.
“Blunt, spare, tautly-honed stories in which lovers wound each other, betray and abandon each other, return to each other, fall in love, out of love, and back in love again, in a Mobius strip of hard-edged prose that captures the unsentimental sexual politics of our time. Joanna Acevedo is an unflinching portraitist with a wicked sense of humor.”
“Joanna Acevedo has many gifts, but the most potent may be: she is a writer who is incapable of being dull. This searing, mesmerizingly entertaining collection will leave you aching for more. She’s a great writer, and this is an exhilarating debut.”
“Joanna Acevedo is not just good—she is thrillingly good. She takes you places—dark, funny roads, eerily beautiful faces and lanscapes—you and books haven’t been to before.”
“I wish I could read Joanna Acevedo for the first time again, and feel that swell of amazement a reader feels when discovering a brave and brilliant writer and thinker ... I envy you, reader, encountering Joanna Acevedo at the beginning of a great career.”
“Love isn’t safe, love isn’t kind. Love is a four letter word in Joanna Acevedo’s Unsaid Things”