Novels
Collections
Girls in the Grass (1991)
First, Body (1997)
In This Light (2011)
Silence and Song (2015)
The 7th Man (poems) (2015)
The Bodies of Birds (poems) (2019)
As If Fire Could Hide Us (2023)
First, Body (1997)
In This Light (2011)
Silence and Song (2015)
The 7th Man (poems) (2015)
The Bodies of Birds (poems) (2019)
As If Fire Could Hide Us (2023)
Melanie Rae Thon recommends
Always Crashing in the Same Car (2023)
Lance Olsen
"Bewildered and bereft, adrift in the ever-grief of his wife's death, scholar Alec Nolens seeks comfort by immersing himself in the sea of words surrounding David Bowie, a project he imagines as a 'love song,' not so much to Bowie, 'as to the lacunae around the thought of him.' Lance Olsen's visionary novel is the apotheosis of such a project. Always Crashing in the Same Car offers a kaleidoscope of Davids tenderly dissolving into Davy Jones, a desperately-human human being awakened to the expansive possibilities of consciousness by the news of his own impending departure, an un-Bowied genius composing his own rapturous elegy to this transient interlude we call a life."
Strange Children (2021)
Sadie Hoagland
"Sadie Hoagland’s vast imaginative compassion gives her uncanny access to the minds and bodies of eight strange children, their histories of abuse and longing for transcendence. I fell in love eight times, bearing the children’s pain, witnessing their afflictions. Through their mesmerizing, gorgeously lyrical language, the reader shares the joyful mysteries of spiritual desire, the ecstasies of secret faith, and the terrifying thrill of subversive reinvention. Harrowing and tender, this fiercely intense, exquisitely composed novel transports us from an isolated polygamist community in the wild desert of southern Utah to the bewildering buzz and glitter of urban streets in Salt Lake City, from the raptures of adolescent love to the violent extremes of sexual obsession. If we are biased, if we cling to comfortable misconceptions about people who live beyond our experience, these magnificently beautiful children will pierce and transfigure us."
Some Things That Meant the World to Me (2009)
Joshua Mohr
"This bold new writer has an uncanny gift for tapping our most dangerous desires. Open the trapdoor at the bottom of the dumpster and prepare yourself to enter a wonderland where violence may pave your path to strange love and potent healing."
More recommendations
Anthologies containing stories by Melanie Rae Thon
Muddy Backroads (2022)
Stories from off the Beaten Path
edited by
Bonnie Jo Campbell and Luanne G Smith
Fakes (2012)
An Anthology of Pseudo-interviews, Faux-lectures, Quasi-letters,
edited by
David Shields and Matthew Vollmer
The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction (1999)
edited by
Michael Martone and Lex Williford
More anthologies
