"Chinquee writes with such precision it stuns how much she gets into a small space. OH BABY will break your heart in one hundred ways, just like that 800-page gorilla you didn't read last week."

--Frederick Barthelme, author of sixteen books of fiction and nonfiction including Double Down, and There Must Be Some Mistake

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"Kim Chinquee is an American original. In Shot Girls, she adds to her already sterling body of work, using spare but sublime prose to tell gripping stories that reveal much about life, love and our common humanity."

 -Ben Bradlee, Jr, author of The Kid: the Immortal Life of Ted Williams and The Forgotten: How the Abandoned People of One Pennsylvania County Elected Donald Trump and Changed America.

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"Kim Chinquee writes tenderly about tough women--soldiers, cops, survivors of violence--and brings a fierce empathy and lyricism to these stories of hardscrabble lives. Chinquee is an important and necessary writer for these times." 

--Dan Chaon, author of Ill Will and Stay Awake

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Kim Chinquee’s stories are raw, bold, and shocking, and her characters seem like a lost generation cut loose from the values and verities of their midwestern forbears. But her clear-eyed style and calm voice compel our empathy and understanding. One of her lines, “Lightning and thunder busted the sky wide open,” could well describe how these hard-edged stories work. The stories are masterful and original. The title story rips you right through the heart and gut."

--Bobbie Ann Mason, author of In Country and The Girl in the Blue Beret

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"Kim Chinquee writes with remarkable heart and grace. Her wise capsulizings of love's devastations and of life's roil and disappointments come at you with a sorrowing precision that comforts even as it haunts."

--Garielle Lutz, author of Stories in the Worst Way and I Looked Alive

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"Kim Chinquee has the dead-eye aim and the precision with language that makes her stories hit the mark again and again. They explore the jangling nervous system beneath the ordinary surface of the world, and all the irony, shock, sadness, and hope contained therein. Pitch-perfect writing broadcast on a very real, and wonderful, frequency." -

-Jean Thompson, National Book Award finalist author of Who Do You Love

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"The girls and women breathing through Chinquee’s pages grapple with the casual cruelty of lovers, parents, and a soul-shattering culture. Hands may be calloused and hearts broken, but pervading every bracing, beautifully crafted sentence is a quiet, insistent strength. These are women you know (maybe yourself) and Shot Girls is an unsentimental declaration: Here I am. See me."

--Dawn Raffel, author of The Secret Life of Objects and Carrying the Body

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"Kim Chinquee is a master storyteller. She brilliantly balances short-short and longer stories. Shot Girls is a sensory delight."

--Brandon Hobson, author of Where the Dead Sit Talking 

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"Beautifully honed stories about lives on the verge of free fall.  Shot Girls is merciless in its frank depiction of the way our messy lives careen off one another, bruising everyone they touch. These are the stories that Raymond Carver might have written if he'd grown up female, was from the midwest, joined the military, and lived into the 21st century."

--Brian Evenson, A Collapse of Horses and What We Talk About When We Talk About Love: Bookmarked

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"To read Kim Chinquee’s work is to be startled, touched and affected. She is an American master of this flash form. As she works in small tight spaces; she packs in a world of family, friends, and guys, food, sex, weather, and always the sure and abiding love of dogs. And she's funny, spit-take funny. These bold stories delve into farm work, bloodwork, bar life, military service, sex, love, the possibility of men and the agility of women. Chinquee's wit and speed and clarity is thrilling."

--Pia Z. Ehrhardt, author of FAMOUS FATHERS and NOW WE ARE SIXTY

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"At turns unsettling and inspirational, PIPETTE tracks the lengths one woman must go to keep herself healthy, sane, and safe. When the narrator moves out of her boyfriend’s home because of threatening behavior, she must grapple with not only rebuilding a home for herself but also with the resurfacing of troubling memories from her past, memories of playing nice to stay safe. As the COVID-19 pandemic advances, the narrator, a writer and English professor, takes a temporary job as a lab technician analyzing test results, finding satisfaction and even pleasure in the precision of her pipetting skills. A tool used to transfer measured liquids safely and accurately, the pipette might also serve as metaphor for how the narrator calibrates her daily activities, parceling the day into writing, self-care, and grueling exercise routines, ever pushing the limits of her body. “I study variations of my heart rate,” she says. The pipette is also an apt metaphor for Chinquee’s prose—sharp, precise chapters, each with the compression and satisfaction of a flash fiction. A moving novel of crystalline structure."

-Eva Heisler, author of READING EMILY DICKINSON IN ICELANDIC
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“This extraordinary novel tells the story of a woman’s ordinary days, lived under the twin shadows of war and the Covid-19 pandemic. In elegantly compressed prose, each short chapter opens a window onto an event or encounter. Sometimes we barely glimpse these moments, seen as if from a passing train. Sometimes the window widens into a door and we’re invited inside: kitchen, bedroom, night streets, park. The narrator meditates on time passing, on life and death and meaning, all while focused on the details of each day. Here she is, massaging kale for salad. Here she is, missing her puppy during a workout. Here she is, in bed with a man who kisses her softly, then leaves the next day. Here she is, buying scrubs for a job at a Covid testing center, which brings back memories of time in the military, of faraway family, of the sickness that hovers everywhere at once. What a gorgeous book, full of believable and urgent details that capture this moment with wisdom and precision. Understated and generous, Kim Chinquee’s beautiful debut novel is a delight to read.”

 —Carol Guess, author of Girl Zoo and Sleep Tight Satellite

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“Pipette is Kim Chinquee’s novel of a fifty-something single woman navigating the life challenges of relationships, career and family history in the age of COVID.Chinquee, a rock star in the flash fiction world, has published several award-winning collections of flash fiction. The chapters in this novel are flash-like in length and they propel the reader through the story, like scrolling through a TikTok feed. It’s hard to put down.Her prose is spare and clean and the narrative voice is dispassionate, which only makes the story more dramatic, more powerful, more heartbreaking, and ultimately more uplifting. It is the story of a woman who does not let her fears control her life. It is a story of courage and triumph.  Highly recommended.”

—Len Joy—author of Dry Heat and Casualties and Survivors
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”What makes a life and gives it meaning? In Pipette, Kim Chinquee explores this question through a hypnotic examination of daily rituals: how we care for the body, the self, and others; our behaviors as friends, lovers, and consumers. Like a lid of ice over a lake, these everyday acts support us through triumph and tragedy. But when the Covid pandemic shatters the world and its surfaces, Chinquee shows the reader in deft and compelling language that sometimes diving far into the depths is the only path to survival.”

—Emma Bolden, Author of The Tiger and the Cage

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"In her new book, Pipette, Kim Chinquee deftly explores the possible ranges of meaning that can grow out of the declarative. Frequently, we are invited to examine her speaker caught in her own rut, drawn in the prosaic domestic. But these pieces are more than mere portraiture; instead, they are expert studies in the range of significance that arises from a single moment, no matter its seeming insignificance. This an author who knows how to take nothing for granted!"

—Kyle McCord, Author of Reunion of the Good Weather Suicide Cult

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“If the pandemic has prompted us to contemplate the thresholds between chapters of our lives, then there is no better book for the moment than Kim Chinquee’s Snowdog. The evocative vignettes of this flash fiction collection—delightfully spare in their prose, yet generous in renderings of characters and places and the frictions between them—allow us to drift away from our ordinary, into moments of intense connection. This is a book for readers with dogs in their lives, and for those without, a companion at a moment when we all need a new way to stay warm.”

—Mary Biddinger, author of Partial Genius

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"In SNOWDOG, Kim Chinquee scratches at the surface of the mundane to reveal the shimmering undercoat of the everyday. Beneath Chinquee’s simple prose is a network of charged observations about sex, relationships, family dynamics, and of course, dogs. The women of these flash fictions are independent, determined, and sometimes struggling: "I move a lot. I know what I want,” says one when she explains her habit of changing therapists. As overlapping protagonists juggle their conflicting desires for independence and companionship, their dogs remain constant and reliable vehicles for humor and reflection in this incisive and surprising book."

--Rochelle Hurt--author of IN WHICH I PLAY THE RUNAWAY and THE RUSTED CITY

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At once fiction and nonfiction, the miniature stories in SNOWDOG interlink to form a family album. In delicate, minimalist prose Kim Chinquee captures moments of piercing intensity between a human family and the dogs they live with. The aesthetic choice she makes again and again: Don’t flinch. Don’t look away. Not from a dog fight, not from lovers’ private words for sex, not from a painful exchange between a childless couple, not from the most vulnerable moment in a mother’s dreams. Shaped around a fictional character who is also her namesake, the protagonist in SNOWDOG turns to dogs for comfort as past and present blur. These stories accumulate like snow to form something quiet, solid, and altogether beautiful.

--Carol Guess, author of GIRL ZOO and WITH ANIMAL

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Turn fifty. Name your dog Hazel. Order a fish sandwich. A dog that smells like peppermint. Imagine a queen. Watch the body deteriorate as if it's not your body. Repair what can almost be repaired. In these stories, Kim Chinquee evokes what it is to be in a place and then to continue on in that place, though not forever. The logic of damage is that harm is presented as an act of care. In these stories, this logic reverses itself, though not always, and not for everyone. "I'm not sure what she needs," says the narrator, "but I know she needs something." In the end, what that might be, and perhaps that's enough, is a dog "with breath like magic." Be tender. Accept love in all its forms, animal to human, when and as it comes.

-- Bhanu Kapil

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A compelling and understated exploration of the American domestic, Snowdog captures the reader through the apparent simplicity of daily living. Building meaning and gaining momentum through repetition of scene and image, Chinquee delivers a book that shows how we understand ourselves into existence.

 -EJ Colen, author of What Weaponry and The Green Condition

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"Kim Chinquee’s Shot Girls flings you into the jittery lives of women and menacing men, of women on the brink of disaster or anomic drift, the stink of smoke and drink, of bad or so-so sex wafting all around. Alternating between lapidary flashes and short fictions that read like novels, Shot Girls is a sledgehammer strike against patriarchy, Chinquee’s deftly drawn dreamers and schemers, drifters and grifters, and gone nuclear families are living, loving, and lying in American pre-fab, its sordid bars and motels, empty parking lots, imposing offices, cold hospitals, and strangling military strongholds. Keenly observed and deeply affecting, Shot Girls is a marvelous haunting, its author a master of loneliness, beauty, desire, sadness, loss."-

-John Madera, The Big Other

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"It’s always a thrill to read the evolving work of Kim Chinquee. In Shot Girls, she often writes in longer forms, but retains all of her characteristic boldness, wit, and commitment to idiosyncratic logic. This book is a treasure.”

--Paul Lisicky, author of The Narrow Door: a Memoir of Friendship 

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"I have admired Kim Chinquee’s work ever since a friend handed me a copy of her vibrant Oh Baby. Since then, my admiration for her writing has grown exponentially. I have handed her books to family members, friends, and students, because I believe in her vision. In her prose poems and flash fiction, Kim Chinquee pulls off in two pages what most writers struggle to accomplish in twenty. A ferocious and compelling world erupts in the reader’s imagination in a Kim Chinquee story, due to the velocity and precision of her language, and in a short span you can feel your mind and heart changing in the best possible ways."

--Greg Ames, author of Buffalo Lockjaw and Funeral Platter
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"Tiny stories written like jewels, long stories with endings that snap into place."

--Terese Svoboda, author of Anything That Burns You and Bohemian Girl

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"Stories full of danger and electric writing. Searing. Brilliant."

--Susan Henderson, author of Up From The Blue and The Flicker of Old Dreams

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"In her new book of very short stories, Kim Chinquee works the flash fiction form in much the same way that Raymond Carver worked somewhat longer story forms: with a stunningly complex simplicity. There is always a roiling subtext beneath the seemingly placid surfaces and tones of Chinquee's stories, a dichotomy which speaks to deep truths about the human condition. Kim Chinquee is a true artist with a true vision, and Pretty is a brilliant book."

--Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer-Prize winning author of A Good Scent From A Strange Mountain

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"These brief snapshots of conversations in specific settings manage to seem not like fragments of lost wholes but like vivid distillations of essential dramas, each a variation on the shared subject of thwarted intimacy. Though each snapshot is complete in itself, the book gathers mass and momentum, and so achieves a singular power."

—Carl Dennis, Pulitzer-Prize winning author of Practical Gods

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"One of the most thrilling things about reading Kim Chinquee's beautifully tiny stories is the great leaps that she takes between sentences--making the reader leap with her into a world of brief glimpses and bits of dialogue that are full of narrative implications, a world of perfectly chosen details that render the understated emotion of a character's whole life."

--Michael Kimball, author of The. Way the Family Got Away and Dear Everybody

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"In her new collection of prose poems/flash fictions, Pretty, Kim Chinquee peels back the surface layers of human experience, giving her readers poignant glimpses of a girl struggling with identity, longing, and unrequited love. But these are not the fanciful farces we were fed as young girls; the lessons Chinquee's character Elle learns as she grows from a young girl to maturity are raw, candid, and unapologetic....her stories leave us with questions such as: What constitutes truth? How do the roles we play influence others? In what ways do we sabotage ourselves? And that's what good writing should do—leave us wondering, experiencing, and discovering again and again."

--Julie Colombo, Rain Taxi

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"...the book as a whole moves toward becoming a major work of art. If the individual flashes don't always come to more then a premonition, together they can take on a haunting wholeness—call it a gestalt. This is something I found lacking in another collection I read recently, Elizabeth Strout's Pulitzer-winning Olive Kitteredge (2008), a novel in stories, Strout's prose, like Moore's, is richly textured, and her novelistic approach to stories is expansive: yet, in terms of their protagonists, neither of their books is more various, or deeper, than Chinquee's Pretty. In fact, I dare say they are less so. Strout or Moore may tell you everything you want to know about a character, but also more than you want to know; Chinquee tells you less, and leaves you desiring."

—Robert Shapard, American Book Review

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