Join us at Juno Books to hear the acclaimed writer, Kirsty Logan, discuss her latest collection of short stories, No & Other Love Stories, with novelist Molly Aitken (The Island Child, 2020, and Bright I Burn, 2024).
Our culture teaches us to say yes to love, to be open to it above all circumstance. But can NO be a declaration of love, too? What happens when love is savage, unsettling, and all-consuming? Logan navigates the cruelties and complexities of desire across time and place with unabashed intrigue, inhabiting the lives of women from a medieval convent, a Victorian parlour, a 90s high school and beyond. They find love in unlikely characters; a local beauty lusts after the flesh of the cumbersome village butcher; a woman in wartime London is curious to discover she prefers her husband a ghost; a pair of sapphic lovers enlist ghost possession to fleece money from lecherous men. The result is a fresh, alluring interrogation of love, lust, and the blurry intersecting of their boundaries.
Kirsty Logan is the author of nine books and recipient of the Lambda Literary Award, Polari First Book Prize, Saboteur, Scott and Gavin Wallace awards. Her work has been optioned for TV, adapted for stage, exhibited in galleries and, most curiously, distributed from a Vintage Wurlitzer cigarette machine. She lives in Glasgow with her wife, baby and rescue dog.
Molly Aitken's short fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, for which she won the Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction 2023. Her first novel The Island Child was longlisted for the Authors' Club Best First Novel Award, and her second, Bright I Burn, was published in 2024. Molly is currently studying for a PhD in Creative Writing and History at Sheffield Hallam University.