Common Body, Royal Bones

A seven-foot-tall princess, a woman with “reverse ESP,” and a tattooed king are the outlandish main characters of these three stories.

This remarkable first book explores the meaning of the nature of the ordinary and the extraordinary. Evelyn Shefner’s three outlandish main characters—a woman with “reverse ESP” who unwittingly transmits rather than receives thoughts, a seven-foot-tall princess of a mythical Eastern European country who becomes an anthropologist, and the tattooed king of a remote northern land—each try to find a way to deal with the day-to-day, and establish a “normal” identity. Utilizing a lyrical style with rolling “piled on” sentence rhythms and marvelous wordplay, these three long stories give the reader an opportunity to get to know these “freaks.” Eventually they become more than acquaintances, they become companions, friends, they become people we care about. Coffee House Press is delighted to introduce this stunning prose stylist to a national audience.

Publication date: December 1, 1987

Format: Trade Paper

Dimensions: 5.5 x 8.5

Page count: 144 pages

ISBN: 9780918273338

Evelyn Shefner was born in Chicago, and studied anthropology at the University of Chicago, but for years her home has been New York City, where she lives with her husband. She has written educational brochures, and edited medical texts and trade journals. Her short stories have appeared in Hudson Review, Colorado Quarterly, Mississippi Rewiew, in the O. HENRY PRIZE STORIES anthology, and THE THINGS THAT DIVIDE US, an anthology from Seal Press. She has held residencies at the MacDowell Colony and at Yaddo, and received a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship for her fiction in 1979.

“Fascinating in an almost Borges kind of way.”

—May Swenson

“I admire Evelyn Shefner’s work for its elegant and supple prose, its irony and verbal playfulness, above all, its insights. It packs hidden jolts and stings in its depths, and is fun to read.”

—Edward Field