Book Launch: Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts by Claire Donato in conversation with Molly Soda and Megan Boyle

The first major book from a longtime legend in underground literature; known by citation and word of mouth, but only now emerging with a work that will earn a broad audience.

“Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts is why I want to read. There are few books at all that expand the exploration of family, outsider sex, animal love, therapy and surreal vision and even fewer writers who do it as well as Claire Donato. My mind and heart are thankfully changed forever.”
—JAMIE STEWART of Xiu Xiu and author of Anything That Moves

“Claire Donato’s prose is at once playful and masterful, charming and haunting—I loved these short stories with huge imaginations.”
—CHELSEA HODSON, author of Tonight I’m Someone Else

“Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts moves and feels like a novel of ideas, yes, but also a lookbook of Rorshachs; a concept cookbook for famished phantoms; a fragmentary tour de force a la Duras. On every page, it lines the mind with vibrant space, as extraordinary in its candor about desire, artifice, and intimacy as it is with wordplay, wit, and social theory. “Death is a mirror of time, and life is not as heavy as it seems,” Donato writes, beckoning us forward through the void of realism as might an imaginary friend we thought we’d lost—or should I say ‘guardian angel’?”
—BLAKE BUTLER, author

“In Claire Donato’s fiction, I am both looking in and being looked at. The depths of desire are on display, laying bare the complexity and the ugliness that often comes with it.”
—MOLLY SODA, artist

“Love is a source of radical questioning whose only enemy is indifference. Claire Donato’s fever dream of a novel goes toe to toe with today’s anomie, stretching our only resource left, language, so we can navigate a 21st century landscape of violently changing relationships, with one another, with the natural world, and with our bodies.”
—JAMIESON WEBSTER, psychoanalyst and author