“I didn’t know how much there was to want in the world until I saw Sheena, and then I wanted it all.” These thirteen short-short stories by Samuel Ligon, illustrated by collage artist Stephen Knezovich, are as dark and absurd as they are poignant, playful, and true, examining men and women and love and loss and donkeys and goats and murder, carnivals, and whiskey bosoms. “Nobody deserves love. Or everyone does. It comes and it goes of its own free will. Like fever. Like flood. Like the greatest thing you’re ever gonna lose. And once it’s gone, it’s gone for good…”
“Wonderland is a fantastic collection of stories. Sam Ligon has mastered the art of capturing the sweet derangement of love. His characters are drunk with desire and reckless in all the right ways, and his prose is incandescent, absurd, wickedly funny and, in the end, achingly true.”
Music: F1 (Traveler feat. Alt Cosmo and jr.FRZa) by Sandro Kait
“In Wonderland, with his razor-sharp prose, Sam Ligon takes his readers to greater territories—baking pies, swallowing Vicodin and whiskey, squeezing doughnuts, kissing in bikinis, recalling donkey poems and snakes, attempting to train blackbirds. From romps though Hiltons to Wagon Wheels and woods, be prepared, Wonderland will take you on journeys you’ll never forget.”
—Kim Chinquee
“Wonderland glitters magic over gritty characters who must navigate a treacherous reality. Desire is consumed through tender violence: of whiskey and of bodies. The stories in Sam Ligon’s Wonderland fold into a collage of flagrant and uncompromising forms and voices and pleasure to parallel the nostalgically luminous collages by Stephen Knezovich. Here is a book to charm all the senses—here is a book that begets imagination.”
—Lily Hoang
“This book is indeed a Wonderland, a bizarre feast for our damaged senses. Samuel Ligon has long been one of my favorite writers because he’s bold and fearless, funny and twisted, and he gets down into the muck and marrow of our human mess. And Stephen Knezovich’s vivid illustrations perfectly compliment Ligon’s crackling prose. Enjoy this freak show of fantastical delights and then tell all your weird friends about it.”
—Robert Lopez