"Elegantly Naked in My Sexy Mental Illness" virtual book tour

Heather Fowler’s fourth collection of fiction speaks the language of need. Desperate, obsessive, even demented need—both emotional and erotic—is voiced by characters ill or ill-advised. From cyber to stalker, illicit, explicit, tender and tedious, the relationships in Elegantly Naked in My Sexy Mental Illness translate love and lust into disorder. How we hear our own need and the way it sounds to others proves in these enthralling stories an imperfect but utterly captivating conversation, a destructive yet dynamic discourse between well-being and disease, images and words.

You can purchase Heather’s book here.
 
Top Ten List!

Interesting Things the Characters Do in Elegantly Naked in My Sexy Mental Illness

1. Star, socialite. Has casual sex then commits randomly destructive acts.

2. Lisa, beleaguered office worker. Fantasizes about being brutalized and murdered by office love interest Howard Sun, and then is mildly pissed off when he shows up in person and interrupts her morbid daydream.

3. Myles, university professor. Designs a "pool-stay" he straps himself into to swim in place, too lazy for monitoring head-bonking into walls. Fetishizes burlap dolls.

4. Tatiana. Makes up alternate histories for her mother in the final stages of delusional bubonic plague.

5. Treble Ann, rural pugilist. Beats a man to death and then boxes is ears with a prosthetic leg he stole from a girl in a barn.

6. Susan, young sister of a bi-polar depressive. Pre-plans remarks about her older sister's eventual suicide, years in advance.

7. Brianne, career woman. Flings every kitchen knife she owns out her Manhattan window—then  goes down to retrieve these to throw them again.

8. Terry, fired businessman. Walks down the street in a black Speedo and his wife's make-up, a tiger, just before biting a cop.

9. Neighborhood child. Defecates in the front yard of the main family because the little girls who live there told him to do so. His parents must come to retrieve it.

10. Michelle, caretaker for the elderly. Burns down the house of a dead woman who tormented her for months—feels no remorse and freaks out her own therapist.

Heather Fowler is the author of the story collections Elegantly Naked in My Sexy Mental Illness; This Time, While We're Awake; People with Holes; and Suspended Heart. Fowler’s work was named a 2012 finalist for Foreword Reviews Book of the Year Award in Short Fiction. She received her M.A. in English and Creative Writing from Hollins University. Her stories and poems have appeared in: PANK, Night Train, storyglossia, Surreal South, Feminist Studies, The Nervous Breakdown, and others. Please visit her website: www.heatherfowlerwrites.com.