“Rae Bryant’s stories yank at you over and over, desperate to give you the clue you never had and to point you, by what’s left out, to a spot on this good earth where the heart might flourish. Getting there is your business, she seems to say, and she doesn’t hold out much hope of your arrival, or of hers. Is it fun? Not so much. Is it necessary? Absolutely.” —Frederick Barthelme
“Rae Bryant’s fiction is smart and sexy and post-feminist and dangerous and akin to doing the tango with a succubus. Do you feel lucky? Part Hannah Tinti, part Kim Addonizio—with enough intense characters, flashy dreams, and edgy visions to entangle your heart and skull for eons. Bite into these thorny stories, before they sink their teeth into you.” —Richard Peabody, Editor, Gargoyle Magazine
“Reading Rae Bryant can be a harrowing experience; hers is a harsh world without wrong or right. But as you make your way through, pains and pleasures meet and build, until it’s like drowning in a lake of silver light.” —Ben Loory, Author of Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day and “The TV,” The New Yorker
Rae Bryant’s fiction is rich with sensual detail, its surface clamoring for our attention like the glamoured skin of a new lover, everything fresh, everything undulled by long familiarity. And what waits beneath, begging to be revealed? Perhaps a writer striking poses, alternately a seductress, a tease, a joker, or perhaps a trickster: for while Bryant is always sure to show us a good time, there comes a sense that sometimes she’s making us laugh just so we don’t notice what else she’s doing, the way her fingernails dig deeply at our freshest wounds, aiming to free the many splinters stuck beneath our skin, and also that oh so good pain waiting just below. —Matt Bell, author of How They Were Found
“Addictive; the rawness, messiness, unattractive infection of love that can cause a woman to gnaw off her arm to sneak away from her sleeping lover. It’s no surprise to find, among these stories, a new Wonder Woman, with a whip. Ah, you say: of course.” —Karen Heuler, author of Journey to Bom Goody, recipient of the O’Henry Award
“Will make you simultaneously laugh and cringe at the squeamish awkwardness of post-one night stand intimacies…witty…strangely fantastical and familiar.”—Flavorpill
“If I had to describe Rae Bryant’s collection The Indefinite State of Imaginary Morals in two words, the words would be these: damn impressive.” —Outsider Writers Collective and Press
“The Indefinite State of Imaginary Morals commands attention. Bryant’s observations on the arcana of the mundane—life, sex, a sense of being—are matched only by her ability to render them strange. Alternatively lyrical and minimal, these stories exemplify the capabilities of the literary weird mode. A must read for any student of post-millennial fiction.” —Darin Bradley, Author of Noise
“Bryant creates a vivid portrayal of what it means to be human, in its gritty glory.” —Weave Magazine
“A distinctive collection that’s imaginative and compelling. These stories show the enormous talent of Rae Bryant beginning to take hold.” —Tim Wendel, author of Castro’s Curveball and High Heat
“Deadpan, visceral, sharply funny.” —Julie Innis
“A new genealogy of morals… a madcap ride through a land of errant desire and lost time.” —Gary Percesepe, editor, BLIP Magazine (formerly Mississippi Review)
“Sweetly erotic without going over the top.” —Jared Randall, Apocryphal Road Code
“Innovative, daring, original writing.” —Kathy Fish, author of A Peculiar Feeling of Restlessness