Dancing Madly: Short Stories

Like the chalk and pastel drawing of a Fractured Girl hanging above a fireplace, fragments of her delicate frame scattered across the canvas, Beth Mead’s powerful book of stories and flash fiction, Dancing Madly, renders the fractured lives of characters leading lives of desperate quiet, showing us the messiness of life, how broken we all are. -Lex Williford, author of Superman on the Roof

In Dancing Madly, Beth Mead explores familial, romantic, and self love. She dives bravely beneath the surface to reveal anxiety, doubt, guilt, and the pain that comes with love, and she does so with a light touch, often using a wickedly dark humor and deceptively simple situations. -Mary Troy, author of Swimming on Hwy N

Beth Mead’s collection is a down-to-earth meditation on the elusive nature of happiness. Some of the stories are grim, even harrowing. Others offer hope. All of them will make you a wiser person about the lives of others.-David Carkeet, author of The Full Catastrophe

In Beth Mead’s stories, as in our own, human relationships are conditional, negotiable, and so knotty we can’t tell whether we are fooling ourselves or being fooled. The characters in Dancing Madly are learning to limit their hopes and expectations. This lesson terrorizes some and hardens or saddens others. Still others emerge as from a chrysalis. -Catherine Rankovic, author of Meet Me: Writers in St. Louis

Mead is a master of gorgeous, matter-of-fact fragment and moment, whether she’s operating in traditional short fiction or something more akin to prose poem. Loss can be reduced to an umbrella given as a gift during the height of love. -Eve Jones, author of Bird in the Machine