Kelly Luce | Hana Sasaki

Winner of Foreword Review’s Editor’s Prize in Fiction and Winner of IBPA’s Bill Fisher Award for Best First Book

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Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail is a debut collection of stories from Kelly Luce. Hana Sasaki will introduce you to many things—among them, an oracular toaster, a woman who grows a tail, and an extraordinary sex-change operation. Set in Japan, these stories tip into the fantastical, plumb the power of memory, and measure the human capacity to love.

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Luce has created a collection in which the donning of soft skins, naked or furred, is both an act of love and an expression of the unremitting strangeness of the self.
- The Chicago Tribune on Hana Sasaki
Luce's...incandescent prose lures readers into a land both familiar and fantastically foreign, melding Japanese folklore and traditions with strange and memorable characters.
- Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) on Hana Sasaki
Kelly Luce makes a persuasive case for why she should be one of your favorite new short-story writers.
- San Francisco Chronicle on Hana Sasaki
...despite Luce’s dazzling suspensions of disbelief, she never once misses the trapeze.
- The Los Angeles Review on Hana Sasaki
Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail is a pleasing mix of fantasy and delicate, intricate description, a tiny volume bursting with stories representing a deft sense of timing, imagination and wit.
- Bookslut on Hana Sasaki
Luce's voice throughout the collection is wonderfully imaginative and strong. She is the benevolent, mischievous force behind each story. And it's a force to be reckoned with.
- The Collagist on Hana Sasaki
Luce manages to effortlessly capture both what it’s like to be a foreigner in Japan and to write in a believable way from the perspective of a native.
- The Japan Times on Hana Sasaki
This isn’t fantasy as means of explaining an inexplicable world, but fantasy as part and parcel of a world that constantly defies our explanation, but more importantly, doesn’t necessarily require an explanation at all.
- Manuel Gonzales on Hana Sasaki
Three Scenarios is the best kind of surprise.
- Austin-American Statesman on Hana Sasaki
...Luce transmogrifies a realistic setting into strange terrain worthy of Dick or LeGuin.
- The Rumpus on Hana Sasaki
The language is fresh and genuine, the characters beguiling or charming in turn and the realities are as delicate and changeable as freshly blown glass.
- The Victoria Advocate on Hana Sasaki

Animated Announcement

Sandy animation by Corrie Francis Parks. Music by In Obscura.

Festival de Cannes

Kevin Berlandi’s Hana Sasaki’s Tail makes its premier at Festival de Cannes!

Kelly Luce’s stories render memorably and with deadpan understatement their protagonists’ obsessive combinations of longing and grief and bafflement in the face of their loved ones’ emotional requirements, even as their worlds slip seamlessly into the uncanny. These stories unsettle as much as they entertain.
Jim Shepard, Author of You Think That's Bad
In Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail, Kelly Luce manages the impossible: each story delicate and enormous, intricate, glitteringly beautiful, never less than strange, never less than profound, ten spiderwebs astonishingly spun. Readers: here is your new favorite short story writer.
Elizabeth McCracken, Author of An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination
Kelly Luce writes stories whose charm is a lasting effect. Her work is witty, unpredictable, and freshly written. There’s a genuine imagination at work here that is a delight to spend time with.
Stuart Dybek, Author of The Coast of Chicago
Let us all now append one more syllable to the list of the most acrobatic imaginations in contemporary American fiction: Saunders, Bender, Link, and Luce! This book in an incantation, and I adore it.
Claire Vaye Watkins, Author of Battleborn
Perhaps the greatest magic of all is Luce’s gift for exploring the pains people take to love and be loved. Luce excels at making the fantastical familiar and the familiar fantastic. Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail is a triumph!
Amber Dermont, Author of The Starboard Sea
Kelly Luce writes rings around most writers, and this is only her first book. Hana Sasaki is bold, strange, funny, and tender. These stories are just such a pleasure to read—so forget this blurb and get to the damn book.
Victor LaValle, Author of The Devil in Silver
Kelly Luce’s stories render memorably and with deadpan understatement their protagonists’ obsessive combinations of longing and grief and bafflement in the face of their loved ones’ emotional requirements, even as their worlds slip seamlessly into the uncanny. These stories unsettle as much as they entertain.
Jim Shepard, Author of You Think That’s Bad