Laura Jean McKay w/ Amy Hirayama, GUNFLOWER

About the Book

The startling and highly anticipated new short story collection from Arthur C. Clarke Award–winning author of The Animals in That Country. explodes and blooms in mesmerizing ways, showing the world both as it is and as it could be.

A family of cat farmers gets the chance to set the felines free. A group of chickens tells it like it is. A female-crewed ship plows through the patriarchy. A support group finds solace in a world without men.

With her trademark humor, energy, and flair, McKay offers glimpses of places where dreams subsume reality, where childhood restarts, where humans embrace their animal selves and animals talk like humans.

About the Author

Laura Jean McKay is the author of The Animals in That Country (2020) - winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Victorian Prize for Literature, and the ABIA Small Publishers Adult Book of the Year, and co-winner of the Aurealis Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. Laura is also the author of Holiday in Cambodia (2013). She was awarded the NZSA Waitangi Day Literary Honours in 2022.

About the Interlocutor

Amy Hirayama is a Hapa writer and educator from Seattle, Washington. She works as the residential workshop administrator for Clarion West, a speculative fiction writer’s workshop. She is also one of the founders of Beam Pedagogy, which provides workshops and retreats focused on educator wellness and changing systems that lead to burnout. Food, family, humor and nature are her favorite things, so she writes about them a lot, sometimes all at once.

Purchase your copy of Gunflower here.

Host or Publisher Elliott Bay Book Company