The Libri GmbH The Fairytale Girl and 12 More Stories Paperback

A bus ride from Bakersfield to L.A. that turns into something no one on board can forget. A neighborhood of seven houses, one beautiful, dangerous girl, and the boys who would do anything for her attention. A wedding where a knife dance reveals a secret no one was supposed to see.In this fifth volume of his acclaimed Short Story Series, David R. Asl turns his unflinching eye on the moments that crack people open - first glances that become obsessions, marriages that quietly rot from the inside, and strangers on buses, in airports, and at parties who carry more darkness, or more longing, than anyone around them realizes.Spanning love and betrayal, lust and loneliness, memory and its loss, these thirteen stories move between the streets of Los Angeles and the alleys of old Tehran, capturing the immigrant heart caught between two worlds - and the universal hunger for connection that follows it everywhere. Asl writes with the candor of someone who has lived every version of heartbreak and isn't interested in softening it for the reader.Funny, uncomfortable, tender, and at times devastating, The Fairytale Girl and 12 More Stories confirms Asl as one of the most fearlessly honest voices writing about love today.