Melanie Rae Thon’s most recent book is As If Fire Could Hide Us (2023). She is also the composer of two collections of lyric fictions, The Bodies of Birds and Silence & Song; the novels The Voice of the River, Sweet Hearts, Iona Moon, and Meteors in August; and the story collections In This Light: New and Selected Stories, First, Body, and Girls in the Grass. Thon’s work has been included in two editions of The Best American Short Stories, three Pushcart Prize Anthologies, and The O. Henry Prize Stories. She is a recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Hopwood Award, and a Writer's Residency from the Lannan Foundation. Thon's fiction has been translated into French, Italian, German, Spanish, Croatian, Finnish, Japanese, Arabic, and Farsi. Originally from Montana, Thon lives in Salt Lake City, where she is Professor Emeritus at the University of Utah.
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First, BodyStoriesFrom"First, Body"
There’s a man inside this woman, and he’s alive. But he can’t speak—she can’t speak—the face is peeled back, the skull empty, and now the cap of bone is being plastered back in place, and now the skin is being stitched shut. The autopsy is over—she’s closed, she’s done—and he’s still in there, with her, in another country, with the smell of shit and blood that’s never going to go away, and he’s not himself at all, he’s her, he’s Gloria Luby—bloated, full of gas, fat and white and dead forever.
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First, BodyStoriesFrom"Nobody’s Daughters"
Yesterday I found a dump of jack-o’-lanterns in the ditch, the smashed faces of all the men I used to know. They grinned to show me the stones in their broken mouths. They’ve taken themselves apart. I’m looking for their unstuffed clothes, hoping they didn’t empty their pockets before their skulls flamed out.
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First, BodyStoriesFrom"Necessary Angels"
I see a dark-skinned boy on a bike riding toward the refrigerator in the field. He doesn’t know what’s in it, but he spots the silver bicycle sparkling in the grass. He can’t believe what he finds. He’s only a child, but he knows she’s dangerous to him. He doesn’t check for breath or pulse, doesn’t lean close to see she’s just a girl. He’s smart enough not to touch. He flies across the field, pumping harder than he thought he could while the sun blazes and spits in the bleached white sky.
First, Body:Stories
Selected Works
- Print Books
- The University of Alabama Press
