Dance on Saturday: Stories

(Paperback)

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Dance on Saturday is a collection of stories about transformation, loss, and human nature. Church-going immortals tend life-extending fruit. Swarms of deadly wasps engineered by a polymath sorcerer battle killer snails. Geese take human form and must survive juvenile detention. A high school, high-stakes volleyball game turns demonic. Heroes and monsters people these exuberant, magical tales.

Reviews

"Elwin Cotmans third collection of short fiction is only six stories long, but each story is packed with rich depth, like jeweled fruits glinting in wet loam. Mixing mythic and contemporary, humor and horror, melancholy and optimism, Cotmans stories range from present-day Pittsburgh to fantasy Africa, with a beautifully flexible polyvocal prose. My two favorite stories make up about half the book: 'Seven Watsons' and the title story both deliver all the sophistication and complexity of a novel at a third of the length, and center Black joy and endurance." NPR Best Books of the Year

"Karen Russells cover blurb praises Cotman as 'a synthesizer of lewd dialect and high lyricism.' Ill speak instead of Cotmans high dialect and lewd lyricism, of how his fashioning of character voices is superbly disciplined, lit from within, while his lyricism is the realm of bawdy jokes and opacity, a kind of literary trolling. She was tall and wide like a sonnet, one character notes and youll just have to trust me on the contrast with the bawdy bits, none of which my editor will let me cite.
"The core of the book is a cleareyed survey of the complexities of Black American experience, distilled in a few lines from the title story: 'I hated the powers for what they had done. But I learned the pride. That I was of a people who could take all the hate and poison of this world, and laugh, and go dance on Saturday.' Amal El-Mohtar, New York Times Book Review

"Cotman utilizes the entire spectrum of fantasy and speculative fiction to write powerful stories on race, power, and human nature. The title novella is particularly stellar, about a group of immortals in Pittsburgh who can extend their life (and limbs) by growing and consuming certain fruit. Its a timely collection filled with wit and beautiful language." Lyndsie Manusos, Book Riot

The landscapes of Elwin Cotman are mythical, searching, and stimulated by haunting fanaticism. Among his third and most ambitious story collection are tales of magical scopethey do more than simply spellbind; they seduce, invite, crack open the extraordinary. . . . In the mold of Octavia Butler and Karen Russell, Dance on Saturday is a bold leap of speculative fiction. Jason Parham, Wired, 2020 Summer Reading List

Inventive, incandescent stories, rich in strangeness. Elwin Cotmans writing is a tonic to ward off drabness and despair. Kelly Link, author of Get in Trouble

Cotman blends humor, emotional clarity, and wild imagination to bring life to stories about identity, power, and human nature. Arianna Rebolini, Buzzfeed, 29 Summer Books You Wont Be Able To Put Down

Fantastically weird short stories infused with elements from Black culture. . . . Each story provides a singular and riveting reading experience. Margaret Kingsbury, Buzzfeed, 17 Summer Must-Reads For Fantasy Lovers

Cotman (Hard Times Blues) wields biting wit, powerful emotion, and magic large and small throughout these six superlative stories. . . . Readers will be blown away. . . . Cotmans bold and timely speculative fiction marks him as a writer to watch. Publishers Weekly, starred review

Fun, inventive fiction that refreshes the fantasy genre with elements of black heritage and culture. Kirkus Reviews

Praise for Elwin Cotmans books:

"Elwin Cotman is one of the most original new voices you will encounterhe is a synthesizer of the domestic and the fantastic, of soaring myth and the grittiest realities, of lewd dialect and high lyricism. His stories are profound engagements with suffering of every stripethey will also make you hoot with laughter. I was amazed by the force of Mr. Cotman's pinwheeling imagination. Karen Russell, author of Orange World

Remarkable stories that are as ambitious as they are personal. Cotman is a first-class stylist with a heart and a wit to match. Paul Tremblay, author of Survivor Song

With its intoxicating blend of rock and roll and the supernatural, crazed religion and visionary prose, Hard Times Blues is a wild ride down the same shadowy American sideroads traveled by the likes of Cormac McCarthy, Greil Marcus and Samuel R. Delany. A marvelous collection by a strikingly original new voice in contemporary fiction. Elizabeth Hand, author of Errantry

With hyperbolic, technicolor imagery and engrossing characters that radiate intrigue, these modern tales comprise a new book of essential fables for our timeread it, close your eyes, and delight in the words still glowing hot inside your brain. Alissa Nutting, author of Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls

Starbursts of talent . . . and a knack for biting and imaginative language. Lauren ONeal, The Rumpus

Proves that magic and grit don't have to be mutually exclusive. Christine Stoddard, Quail Bell Magazine

Cotmans interests are wide-ranging: Punk rock intersects with D.C.s Dominican community, African-American folktale intersects with Greek myth, Goth teen suburban angst in 1990s Ohio sits side by side with racist atrocity in the pre-Civil Rights South . . . Yeah, theres magic in some of these stories, but the real magic is in Cotmans words themselvesstark and deadpan one moment, lushly descriptive the next. Michael S. Begnal, author of Ancestor Worship

This is not always a comfortable book to read, but it is a magnificent one. The Jack Daniels Sessions EP: A Collection of Fantasies is comprised of short stories and vignettes that flow into one another like the Mississippi rushes over the Delta. Elwin Cotman is a writer, an activist, a performance artist and above all, an impeccable storyteller. . . . With raw and sometimes shocking authenticity, Cotman turns the ordinary into the sublime. There is no pretension here, just a million-watt light shining into corners of the human condition that many people would prefer forgotten, with a large helping of fantastic creatures, classical myth, and modern mayhem. Erzebet YellowBoy, Cabinet des Fes

"Elwin Cotman's carefully wrought, gracefully accomplished, and lyrical narratives range in tone and style from picaresque and carnivalesque to elegiac, ironic, and melancholy. Yet, while tonally distinctive and aesthetically vivid, his stories are not so much driven by style or voice, as they are by love in the largest sense. For love does not exclude chaos nor avoid the vicissitudes of history and neither do Cotman's socially engaged, brilliantly crafted stories. Miranda Mellis

Author Bio

Elwin Cotman (elwincotman.com) is a native of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He is the author of Dance on Saturday and two previous collections of short stories, The Jack Daniels Sessions EP and Hard Times Blues. In 2011 he was nominated for a Carl Brandon Society Award. He has toured extensively across North America and Europe. He is at work on his first novel.