Winner of the 1997 Whiting Writers’ Award: Taut, persistent, and brilliantly cadenced, First, Body is a testament to the breathtaking virtuosity of Granta-acclaimed author Melanie Rae Thon. Through nine searing works of fiction, Melanie Rae Thon looks to the people who live in the borderlands, turning a keen and compassionate eye to those marginalized by circumstance and transgression. Taking us from the cobblestone streets of Boston to a deserted Montana road, from dance halls to hospital morgues, these urgent tales careen between the faults of the body and those of the mind, exploring the irruption of the past through the present, the sudden accidents and misguided passions that make it impossible to return to the safe territory of a former life

Charged by lyrical prose and vivid evocations of a more-than-human world, Meteors in August proves itself a magnificent debut, a tale of despair and salvation in all their many forms. Lizzie Macon is seven when her father drives a Native American named Red Elk out of their valley and comes home with blood on his clothes. The following year, her older sister, Nina, cuts her head from every family photograph and runs away with Red Elk’s son and their unborn child. Nina’s actions have consequences no one could have predicted: jittery reverberations of violence throughout the isolated northern Montana mill town of Willis. Sparks of racial prejudice and fundamentalist fever flare until one scorching August when three cataclysmic events change the town — and Lizzie’s family — forever