A novel by Selah Saterstrom

September 1, 2007 • 5 x 7.5 • 240 pages • 978-1-56689-201-8

A searing coming-of-age novel set to the music of chance.

In lyric, diamond-cut prose, Selah Saterstrom revisits the pastoral, dead-end Southern town of Beau Repose, following our strung-out, fiercely intelligent narrator through her harrowing adolescence and into the academic halls and back alleys of Scotland. As the feverish St. Vitus’s dance of her youth morphs into slow-motion inertia abroad, an illness brings her home again—to face the legacy of pain she left behind and to find a way to become the lead in a dance of her own creation.

About the Author

Selah Saterstrom is the author of the novels Slab, The Meat and Spirit Plan, and The Pink Institution, all published by Coffee House Press. Widely published and anthologized, she also curates Madame Harriette Presents, an occasional series. She teaches and lectures across the United States and is the director of Creative Writing at the University of Denver.

Born in 1974, Saterstrom grew up in Natchez, Jackson, and Pass Christian, Mississippi. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, her Masters in Theology and Literature from the University of Glasgow in Scotland, and her MFA from Goddard College in Vermont. She is the editor of Soul Collections, an anthology of prose and poetry written by at-risk teenagers in North Carolina and her work has recently appeared in Big Bridge, the Café Review, Fourteen Hills, Tarpaulin Sky, the American Book Review, Ellipsis, Cranbrook Magazine, and elsewhere. The Meat and Spirit Plan is her second novel and a portion of the author’s proceeds will be donated to Our Voice, a nonprofit crisis intervention agency serving Western North Carolina and to the Kim Duckett Fund for Women.

A former instructor at Warren Wilson College in Asheville, North Carolina, Saterstrom currently lives in Colorado and is on the faculty of the University of Denver’s Creative Writing Program.

Thanks to a 2013 ADA Access Improvement Grant administered by VSA Minnesota for the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, this title is also formatted for screen readers which make text accessible to the blind and visually impaired. To purchase this title for use with a screen reader please call (612) 338-0125 or email us at info@coffeehousepress.org.

Reviews

“The Meat and Spirit Plan is ferocious and dazzling, the work of a savage poet. Every scene is a hard polished gem of raunch and revelation. Strung together they build a force of piercing tenderness. It’s an impressive achievement, and a real pleasure to read.” —Katherine Dunn, author of Geek Love