Acts of Contrition, by Victoria Waddle, is now available for Presale.
Los Nietos Press is pleased to announce the upcoming release of Acts of Contrition, a collection of short stories by Victoria Waddle. Presales are available now; the book release date is March 15, 2021.
A resident of the Inland Empire, Victoria Waddle has created a gripping short story collection about the complex lives of modern women. The women in Acts of Contrition face society’s devaluation, from parents, from elders, from all who assume authority of them. Some can look back and laugh, some find luck in their escape from harm, some engineer their own good fortune, all the while riding a wave of dark humor. They battle oppressions as simple as gender stereotyping, as complex as prerequisites to friendship or love. What all the characters come to understand is that silence places them at greater risk than speaking out. They progress toward freedom through the telling of their stories.
Why Presales? Presales are important to the the life and popularity of the book, to the author, and to the press. They show other potential readers, and book sellers, that readers value the author’s work and are looking forward to the release.
Here is what reviewers have to say:
“ Acts of Contrition is a great collection, one I read in a single sitting, the stories sly and engaging, hilariously dark and always surprising. The women of Victoria Waddle’s fiction are characters I’d spend much more time with – they are brutally honest, have excellent talents at remembering, and they soldier on with grace and humor and wine.”
—Susan Straight, author of eight novels, including Highwire Moon, and one memoir, In the Country of Women
In “Solvent,” one of the later stories in this collection, a reformed Evangelical-Christian-turned-New-agey-vegan-spiritual pyramid scheme saleswoman demonstrates the effectiveness of a caustic cleaning product over an heirloom dining table to a pair of tipsy Mormon missionary boys and a mother-daughter team of Jehovah’s Witnesses. In this one anecdote, the entire collection is distilled.”
—Cati Porter, author of The Body at a Loss, Director of Inlandia Institute
“I love Victoria Waddle’s Acts of Contrition for the way it sees life not as mundane but as meaningful. What a lesser writer might have missed about the meaning of those moments that pass us by, Waddle is able to explore, and her stories are extraordinary. They are magic. They draw out both the absurdity of personal mythologies found in tarot cards, prayers, and omens and the wonder in them as well. They find the magic in the extraordinary and in the every day.”
—John Brantingham, Poet Laureate of Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Park
Victoria Waddle has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, is a Bosque Magazine Fiction Prize finalist and is included in Best Short Stories from The Saturday Evening Post Great American Fiction Contest. She is the managing editor of Inlandia: A Literary Journey, the literary journal of the Inlandia Institute.
Clifton Snider, faculty emeritus at Cal State University Long Beach, is the internationally celebrated author of ten books of poetry. A career retrospective of his work, Moonman: New and Selected Poems, was published to great acclaim by World Parade Books in 2012. He has published four novels, including his first historical novel, The Plymouth Papers (Spout Hill Press, 2014). A Jungian/Queer literary critic, his book, The Stuff That Dreams Are Made On, was published in 1991, and he has published hundreds of poems, short stories, reviews, and articles internationally. He pioneered LGBT literary studies at CSULB. His work has been translated into Arabic, French, Spanish, and Russian.
