FINALIST for the Last Syllable Book Award
What happens when you peak in high school, or maybe earlier, or maybe not at all? When you hate your friends, or love them too much? When the warmth of nostalgia starts to slowly poison you? In Girl on Girl, Emily Costa explores desperation and loneliness, screen obsession, and casual cruelty as characters—mostly women and girls—struggle to be seen. Out now from Rejection Letters.
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*~* praise for Girl on Girl *~*
“While I read Girl on Girl I kept texting great lines to my friends, sometimes pics of whole pages, or summaries of entire stories. You gotta read this book, I kept saying. Emily Costa is magic.”
—Bud Smith, author of Teenager
“You are a frog in biology class. Costa holds the scalpel. Her lab partner can’t even look at you or smell you, spraying the air with Clinique Happy to cover up the scent of formaldehyde. But Costa uncovers your hidden organs. She finds your secrets. She shows the class all the things you wanted them to find and all the things you didn’t.”
—Claire Hopple, author of Echo Chamber
“Emily Costa’s writing tells of a world where intimacy and violence are inextricably linked, producing stories that pulse with guilty, forbidden energy. Her distinctive voice—by turns pleading, sterile, and wistful—creates a catalog of female relationships in all their complexity—the tenderness, the cruelty, and the moments where you can’t tell which is which.”
—Kyle Seibel, author of Hey You Assholes
“I’ve been looking forward to (the idea of) this collection since I first read Costa years ago, and it exceeds even all those anticipated expectations. The characters in Girl on Girl struggle with growing up, with being girls, with being human in ways that would feel achingly painful if it weren’t all written through this attentive eye, exciting voice, and pitch perfect POV that makes every story, every moment, a new fave reading experience. ”
—Aaron Burch, author of Year of the Buffalo
“Girl on Girl is a masterclass in coming-of-age horror. If Emily Costa isn’t one of your favorite writers yet, she will be after this.”
—D.T. Robbins, author of Leasing
“Through abandoned malls, high school reunions, a single mom’s stash of sex tapes, stolen credit cards, and the fearful mind of a teenage girl, Emily Costa’s Girl on Girl poetically and potently examines the crimes we commit against each other and our strange intimacies. In the tradition of Lorrie Moore and Lydia Davis, Costa will leave you gasping, wondering how she builds an entire world and eviscerates it so beautifully. An absolute masterclass in the craft of short stories.”
—Lexi Kent-Monning, author of The Burden of Joy
“In Emily Costa’s Girl on Girl, dads are abducted by aliens or by Valium, ears are pierced by Metallica pins, amateur professional wrestling isn’t an oxymoron but is, somehow, a job. The stories in this collection are tight little balled fists, and they will leave a mark.”
—Xhenet Aliu, author of Everybody Says It’s Everything and Brass
*~* other nice things people have said *~*
“the Midwest Emo of short story collections” & “like listening to your favorite album as a kid, but you’re an adult now and you realize all the songs are about cocaine addiction and all the v adult pain that goes into it and you’re kinda bummed out now but you can’t stop playing the record…basically, reading [Girl on Girl] feels like listening to Third Eye Blind”
—Caleb Bethea, author of Disco Murder City
“made me feel at times that I was reading a cursed object” —Ryan Bradford, author of Horror Business
“[Girl on Girl] made my stomach hurt and I liked it” —Lauren Lavín, writer, editor, & musician
Emily Costa 