Benz, Chanelle

"A stunningly original debut collection , the The man who shot out my eye is dead is about lives across history marked by violence and longing. In ten stories of impressive range, Chanelle Benz displays a staggering command of craft as she crisscrossses through time and space to create a complex mosaic of humanity." This collection of stories explores diverse lives across history that are marked by violence and longing, from a Philadelphia youth who struggles with his father's incarceration to a sixteenth-century English monk who suffers the dissolution of his monastery. "The characters in Benz's wildly imaginative collection are as varied as in any recent literature, subverting boundaries of race, gender, and class, but they share a thirst for adventure that sends them rushing toward moral crossroads, becoming victims and perpetrators along the way. Riveting, viseral, and heartbreaking, Benz's stories of identity, abandoment, and fierce love come together in a daring, arresting vision. Benz emerges on the scene as an indomitable talent and a brilliant new literary force.".

Billie James learns she has inherited her poet father's Mississippi Delta shack thirty years after he died. When she returns to remodel the shack into a rental, she learns from locals that she went missing the day he died, when she was only four years old. As she digs through her father's writings, she uncovers the truth of his death and her disappearance.