Author Leslie Kirk Campbell discusses her short story collection The Man with Eight Pairs of Legs with Kathryn Savage

About the book:

At its core, the book is about body-memory, the way we hold our pasts on our skin, visibly – bruises, scars, tracks, tattoos – and invisibly, over generations. Three of the eight stories focus on women's bodies, and the violation of women's bodies; in a fourth, "Triptych," we go back to the early 80s and the AIDS epidemic in a story about an artist/single mother and her dying neighbor; in a fifth, "Tasmanians," an Armenian-American woman tries to separate from the suffering she has inherited from her father and grandmother as well as a slew of relatives she has never known.

These stories take place in a range of settings: from a small town in Colorado to Bangkok, from Illinois to the Rheinhessen and tell the stories of men and women from a variety of backgrounds: a young opera singer, a high school history teacher, an engineer, a painter, a monk, all longing for something they are willing to court danger to find.

PRAISE FOR THE MAN WITH EIGHT PAIRS OF LEGS:

Marvelous…sexy…harrowing.—Anthony Doerr, author of All the Light We Cannot See & Cloud Cuckoo Land

Compelling…unpredictable….vibrant and vital…a memorable force.—Stuart Dybek, Ecstatic Cahoots: Fifty Short Stories

Hypnotic, strange, and lovely.—Michelle Wildgen, Tin House

Engaging…surprising…poignant.—Publishers Weekly

A meaningful and utterly devastating collection…cements Campbell as a leading short story writer. —BuzzFeed

Leslie Kirk Campbell’s debut short story collection, The Man with Eight Pairs of Legs (Sarabande Books) won the 2020 Mary McCarthy Prize for Short Fiction. Ploughshares published the title story in 2021. Her award-winning stories have appeared in Arts & Letters, Briar Cliff Review, Southern Indiana Review and The Thomas Wolfe Review. She has received fellowships at Playa and Ucross. The author of Journey into Motherhood (Riverhead), she currently splits her time between her ohana in Honolulu and her ohana in San Francisco, where she teaches at Ripe Fruit Writing, a creative writing program she founded in 1991. Her next collection, Free Radicals, is in the making.

Kathryn Savage’s debut lyric essay collection, Groundglass, is forthcoming from Coffee House Press (2022). Her other writing has appeared or is forthcoming in American Short Fiction, BOMB Magazine, Ecotone Magazine, the Virginia Quarterly Review, and the anthology, Rewilding: Poems for the Environment. Recipient of the James Wright Prize from the Academy of American Poets, her work has been supported by fellowships and residencies from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Minnesota State Arts Board, Ucross Foundation, and Tulsa Artist Fellowship. She lives with her family in Minneapolis, and teaches creative writing at The Minneapolis College of Art and Design.

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