Salve

Fiction. Asian & Asian American Studies. Women's Studies. Frazier's stories, in seamless prose, examine the myriad ways in which we soothe ourselves in an attempt to treat what ails us—for better or for worse

"These intimate, gutsy, heartbreaking stories—stories about having bodies and having histories, having desire and having had desire—left me pleasantly shaken, cured of some psychic ailment I hadn't known I was afflicted with. This book is full of secrets, frank revelations, brutal honesties and tenderness; hard-won emotional truths and the bittersweet understanding that our primary relationship is with our self."—Michelle Tea

"Harsh and beautiful, yearning and deadly, the stories of Soma Mei Sheng Frazier will remind you of nothing less than the whole wide world."—Daniel Handler, AKA Lemony Snicket

"Brilliant is a word usually associated with diamonds; therefore, this is the appropriate word for Soma Mei Sheng Frazier, who writes like a young Toni Morrison: clear, clean, yet heart skipping for all the things she is not telling. Crisp. Deliciously enticing as the story unfolds. Soma is a wonderful writer on the rise. Perhaps I should have started this story with the first star of evening, visible to our planet but harking of another shore, lighting our sky. We walk the beach with her. And the tide pulls the diamonds to our hands.—Nikki Giovanni