A Map of Lost Places

SYNOPSIS

“First, get off the highway. Highways will never take you where you want to go,” instructs the narrator of “How to Find Your Way to Black Bread Lake,” one of the mythical destinations found in Kathryn Kulpa’s A Map of Lost Places. This collection of flash fiction and prose poetry considers the idea of the liminal—the unmapped country between what was and what will be, the thresholds and borders that all of us at times inhabit, and some of us may choose to call home. These stories explore the slipped spaces between the magical and the mundane: between childhood and adolescence, adolescence and adulthood, dream and reality, living and dead, human and animal, girl and woman. A woman flees her abusive husband with a wad of cash stuffed in a coca tin; girls run amok with their grandmother’s wheelchair; murdered women speak from the dead: all of these and more wait in the pages of A Map of Lost Places.

PRAISE

A Map of Lost Places is everything I want in a book: surreal, tender, brilliant, and endlessly inventive. Written in vignettes exploring liminal spaces, every story is like a shooting star that makes you elbow your friend to make sure they saw it too. They are lyrical bursts of light, transformative and transportive, despairing and heart-wrenching. What can I say—this book dazzled me.
—Mac (Marisa) Crane, author of I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself