The Secret and the Sacred

Erin K. Parker’s The Secret and the Sacred is a collection of short stories that will linger long after you’ve closed the book. What happens when your new friend confesses that he has a terminal illness? When the people in the next apartment make you feel like you’re never alone? When you discover you have hidden powers to right the wrongs? When you receive a message from the dead? When you find healing and real magic in the most intensive customer service job in the world? When you hit the bottom and there is no other choice but to figure out how to rebuild everything? Sometimes what keeps us going are our secrets. And sometimes it’s the sacred things that save us once we learn how to see them. The Secret and the Sacred is hilarious, disturbing, heartbreaking and unrelentingly alive. These stories confront the horror and the irony of what it is to be alive in our era with a sense of compassion and empathy that is all, too rare in most contemporary writing. –Seth Fischer, The Rumpus Erin K. Parker’s collection, The Secret and the Sacred, immerses us in ‘daily abrasion mixed with fireworks’ of dating hell, wacked neighbors, lost and found love, ghosts penetrating new terrain through fear and discovery of power that rocks us into the strange species that we are. Read it. –Meg Tuite, author of Bound By Blue A fierce and delicate first book, The Secret and the Sacred contains stories that pierce your heart, engage your mind, slay your being. Line by line, this is a haunting postcard to former lovers, any partner, every naysayer. A terrific read. –Robert Vaughan, author of Addicts & Basements